Rare Sea and Ngài are pleased to introduce “Cruising Utopia”, a group exhibition featuring Nhân Phan, Hiếu Ngọc, Hoàng Anh and Vỹ Lân. Spanning works from sculpture, silk paintings, installation, performance to a showcase of the fifth collection from Ngài, the exhibition dives into multi-perspectives of entering, being within and beyond the utopian world. Together, the artists propose and investigate utopianism as an alternative mode of queer being—one that records history, hosting refugees, and imagines otherwise.
Inspired by José Esteban Muñoz's “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity”, the exhibition is a collective gesture of a queer hope—a critical desiring that stems from the recognition of something not-yet-here in a system yet to accommodate queerness. Cruising Utopia is a coming together of Vietnamese queer artists and creatives from different disciplines, to conjure a beginning and sketch out a schema for a collective queer utopia, where the past nourishes the possibilities of the future, structured by queer hope and longing.

We warmly invite you to join us in the Opening Reception on Friday, July 3, 2026, from 6:00PM to 8:00PM.

EXHIBITION DETAILS:
Time: July 04 – July 26, 2026
Opening hours: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Tuesday – Sunday, or by appointment
Venue: Rare Sea – 3 Đặng Thị Nhu, Bến Thành Ward, HCMC
Free admission
Contact: info@raresea.vn
Telephone: +84 904 497 769
Parking: TNXP parking lot – 4 Trương Định, Bến Thành Ward (900m; 2 minutes by walking)

Learn more about the exhibition and the artists at here: https://raresea.vn/exhibitions/cruising-utopia/.

ABOUT NGÀI

Established in 2023, Ngài is a fashion brand that explores the Viet queer identity. Ngài embodies the tension between opposing definitions: between masculinity and femininity, between the established power and the ephemeral myths.
Ngài shifts fluidly across the grey areas of semantics, culture, and gender; blur the binaries and make way for new expressions that are ambiguous, gender-defying, disruptive, and intimate.

Through fashion, Ngài traces the unique experiences of queerness and aspires to furthermore build a community that celebrates diversity and creative expressions through different collaborations unlimited by our common fashion practice.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Hoàng Anh is a painter and a photographer based in Hanoi. In recent years, Hoàng Anh has centered her artistic practice on Vietnamese silk painting, where she orchestrates spontaneous dialogues between fine arts and fashion. Moving beyond traditional boundaries, her works represent a vibrant intersection of modern visual language and multifaceted personal experiences.

Inspired by the raw energy of Punk-rock, the symbolism of Pop-art, and the depth of various sub-cultures, Hoàng Anh's compositions maximize visual impact through bold and striking color palettes. For her, merging music, fashion, and photography onto silk not only creates novel experiences but also serves as a way to break away from artistic stereotypes.

Nguyễn Hiếu Ngọc is a young multidisciplinary artist based in Saigon. His practice spans performance, installation, and sculpture. Ngọc works with sensation and is interested in the tension between inner chaos and outward stillness, seeing the body as an in-between space that holds memories and emotions in constant movement. His works emerge from presence, personal observations, and a sensitivity to space, time, and the things unfolding around him.

Ngọc has participated with “Lắng Nghe Điểm Chạm”, an initiative for application potentials of performing arts into the life of Deaf/Hard of Hearing individuals in Vietnam. He also worked with Young Boy Dancing Group, Bussy Temple, Dismal, Project Đẩy Sàn, and has performed at Nổ Cái Bùm, Goethe Institut HCMC, Tắm Đêm, and other independent art spaces.

Nhân Phan is a media artist, known for his work with software, installation, and film. Born into the Internet era and raised in transition across homes, his life is a scatter of moments, places, and people — both lived physically and digitally. Dwelling in this hybridity, Nhân's work becomes his manual for being human in the generation of tech. Here, algorithms and devices become agents of desire, interfering with reciprocity, producing both friction and pleasure. Nhân uses love and even cheesiness as critical gestures against the current overly design-driven tech industry, which increasingly diminishes human touch and moral complexity in pursuit of profit and surface appeal.

Nhân is a graduate candidate of UCLA's MFA in Media Arts, as a Fulbright student. He is the founder of CodeSurfing — a creative technology collective in Vietnam. He was a recipient, then a mentor of the Processing Fellowship, and a finalist of Lumen Prize.

Vỹ Lân (Linh Thân) is a filmmaker and community organizer whose work explores the psychological textures of urban life through cinema, text, and collective action. Lân founded Tắm Đêm (@tamdem_nightswim), a fluid poetry project that creates shared spaces for productive vulnerability, connecting individual voices via collective archives and collaborative writing experiments. At the core of the project's vision are poetry performances, collaborative writing, and experimentation – seeking, co-writing, and “translating” poetry. Tắm Đêm has developed numerous creative projects in collaboration with other community organizations, including Montez Radio & Press, Lèm Dị Dị Art Festival, VietPride, Hanoi Queer, EMASI Schools, Nguyen Art Foundation, among other partners.