Annam Gallery is honored to present A “Second” Gaze, an exhibition gathering the young women artists of Vietnam: Lâm Tú Trân, Lê Mai, Một Quả Tắc, and Yến Nguyễn. Here, they come together in dialogue—about how women see, how they feel, and how they fashion the world around them. The exhibition is conceived as a philosophical–aesthetic experiment, where artists and their works summon the viewer into a contemplative journey on subject and object, and on the female gaze itself.

The title A “Second” Gaze takes its inspiration from the phenomenon of the female gaze and from Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex. In 1975, theorist Laura Mulvey observed that culture and mass media—especially the classical cinema of Hollywood—were constructed upon the male gaze and its scopophilia, reducing women to a mere value of “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Out of this critique emerged the notion of the female gaze, pointing toward the existence of a vision from “the other side”: a “second” gaze.

With the desire to illuminate female subjectivity, the exhibition and its participating artists show that women can construct their gaze out of their own experiences and identities. A “Second” Gaze does not seek to define “the feminine” as a fixed essence. Rather, it creates a space of dialogue, where aesthetics and philosophy intertwine, and femininity itself appears as an open possibility—diverse, shifting, and unceasingly in motion.

The artists, coming from different regions of Vietnam, pursue diverse styles and schools of thought, carrying with them distinct cultural inheritances. From this plurality arises a multidimensional conversation about the female gaze within a global context. Each work is thus not only an individual creation but also a voyage—bearing the trace of journeys, origins, and movements. Their presence enriches and expands the fabric of what we may call a Vietnamese female gaze today.

Admission: 50.000VND/person.