Rare Sea warmly introduces "fiction, fraction", a group exhibition featuring works by Lê Đ. Chung, Lê Nguyễn Minh Như, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai, Huyền Dương, Thanh Tùng (Ches) and Sophia Mai Brown. Through oil painting, lacquer, hand-printed practice, silk and paper, the exhibition brings together distinct visual languages. Here, the flatness of a painting is not a limit, but an invitation into layers of gestures, materials and time that accumulate across surfaces, allowing paintings and prints to hold multiple narratives and histories. Together, these works become visual fables that transmit fragmented narratives about a society still haunted by memories of upheavals, trapped in production, and immersed in material excess.

"fiction, fraction" begins from whispers: sometimes as intimations from dreams, sometimes as collective silences, tracing shadows on the wall of an abandoned tea factory, lurking beneath urban soil, echoing in the taste of wild plants, lingering between the real and the imaginary. In this turbulent era, what lullabies are better than fables and the realms of the perennial? Where imagined creatures dwell, where scenes of labor unfold as unresolved mysteries, where space and time reverse and humans remain faceless in their naming. In-between these realms, stories that seem disconnected reveal shared histories and collective memories, opening spaces for personal documentation, archival practice, translation, and interpretation beyond official narratives enforced by institutions.

Neither abstract nor deliberately realistic, the works transmit small, fragmentary stories in visual forms. These minor tales become fables that open not only pathways for escape but also alternative visions of cities, landscapes, and communities. They are stories that have always been there, murmuring faintly beneath the polished layers of the world—where small fractions accumulate into an unfinished landscape that is forever in progress.

We warmly invite you to join us in the Opening Reception on Friday, August 7, 2026 from 6PM to 8PM.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Opening Reception: 6:00PM – 8:00PM, Friday, August 7, 2026
Time: August 8 – October 4, 2026
Opening hours: 10:00AM – 6:00PM, 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 here: https://raresea.vn/fiction-fraction-intro/

Typography design by Minh Thuỳ.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sophia Mai Brown (b. 2000, Vietnam) is an artist based in New York City, working in drawing and printmaking. Brown maps interactions between the natural and the built world, connecting real landscapes with imaginary inhabitants. She is the recipient of awards including the Fulbright Grant and Manhattan Graphics Center Fellowship. Brown holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Huyền Dương (b. 2001) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, with interests drawn from personal experiences and everyday events. Trained in oil painting, she works across traditional materials - including textiles, papermaking, and printmaking - as well as digital tools, circuit bending, and toy making, bringing these elements together within installation-based practices.
Her current focus centers on creating spatial works responding to specific environments, integrating material, audio, and video components to deepen narrative and emotional resonance. Through the combination of handcrafted processes and experimental media systems, her practice investigates the relationship between material, movement, repetition, and sensory experience within space. Huyen holds a BFA in Oil Painting from Tama Art University (Tokyo, Japan). Her works have been featured in the group exhibition Harsh Touch (2024) at Koganei Art Spot Chateau 2F (Tokyo, Japan) and the absurd cycle of everyday events (2026) at Toong Coworking Space (HCMC, Vietnam).

Thanh Tùng (Ches, b. 1998, Hai Phong, Vietnam) is a multimedia artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. His practice is rooted in observations of everyday street life in Vietnam, where urbanization continually reshapes landscapes, ecosystems, and indigenous belief systems. Drawing on fables, urban legends, and oral histories, he constructs speculative narratives to explore what remains in the wake of these changes, reconnecting people with forms of life and traces that are gradually disappearing.

Throughout his practice, he approaches death not as an ending but as a state of transformation, in which disappearance gives rise to other modes of existence. Working within the gap between what has been lost and what is still emerging, his works evoke a sense of both familiarity and estrangement as people encounter environments shaped by continual overwriting and renewal. They reflect on how places continue to carry traces that endure beyond their visible forms.

Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai employs various mediums such as drawing, installation, documentary film, video, and journalism to highlight issues spanning from personal narratives to broader themes of history and migration. Her works interweave research and experimentation, documentation and imagination. Exploring diverse subjects such as body, femininity, history, post-war, and migration, Mai's art pieces are disjointed fragments that provide a window into the societal landscape she inhabits and passionately explores.

Holding a Master of Fine Arts degree from Mahasarakham University, Thailand (2012), Mai currently serves as a lecturer at University of Arts, Hue University. She received the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award in 2014 and the Artist Excellence Award in 2021 from The Factory.

Lê Nguyễn Minh Như (b. 1996) is among the few young artists in Vietnam who approaches Vietnamese silk painting through mineral pigments, rethinking a medium that has been closely tied to the aesthetics of transparent watercolors over the past century. Minh Như’s works leave a lasting impression through mineral pigments resting on the silk surface like layers of sediments, giving the works a tangible material presence through which the viewers can feel the weight of time accumulated in each stratum. This approach redefines silk as an archival surface, where memories, dreams, and elusive sensations are recorded like ecological traces. It is a contribution that expands the possibilities of the medium beyond its conventional aesthetic language and toward the realm of material painting.

The 2023 Dogma Prize marked a turning point in the critical recognition of Minh Như’s visual language. Subsequently, the duo exhibition “Vọng cảnh” (2023) opened a dialogue between her artistic practice and that of another artist. Since then, her presence at the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Art (2023), VCCC (2024),...have continued to shape her artistic trajectory.

Lê Đ. Chung, born in 1990, lives and works in Đắk Nông. With a multidisciplinary practice that includes painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, Đ. Chung examines everyday events as well as working with historical and counter-historical narratives. Through this, he explores contradictions and the complexities of ongoing reality, along with the enigmatic descent of unresolved motifs and meanings from the past.