Rare Sea Presents Group Exhibition: fiction, fraction

Poster credit: Rare Sea

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.

Lê Đ. Chung, following the stone wall and we found an electric generator…, 2026, Image courtesy of Phạm Hồ Chí

From urban materiality and colonial archives rooted in maps, soil, dust and oral histories, Sophia Mai Brown and Thanh Tùng (Ches) challenge and expand the positioning of urban development. They open up space and time through multiple vantage points: the city reconfigured through layers of buildings, where roads become rivers and rivers become roads, overlaid onto colonial maps of Saigon; or an organic anatomy of decay unfolding beneath the street surface. Through mythical elements—worldmaking, imagined creatures, traces of local legends—the artists treat the environment not as a background but as a living character, whose voice carries through cycles of growth and decomposition.

Tracing real communities and places across past and present, Lê Đ. Chung and Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai employ different types of visual journals to record fragments of narratives in different geographical areas. Both follow the threads of history to recount ongoing consequences of coercion. Lê Đ. Chung exploits the layers of oil paint to foreground the unresolved absurdities in the life of a post-Đổi Mới migrant community, who dwell on the remains of an abandoned factory in Lâm Đồng. On the fragility of notebook paper and carbon paper, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai whispers the silent relationship formed between humans and the amaranth, which resiliently carries the violence that haunts Vietnamese-Cambodian survivors of forced displacement under the Khmer Rouge from Kampong Chhnang (Cambodia)—a community still being displaced today. If Lê Đ. Chung records the rumbling conflicts of another enforcement that continues on post-colonial ruins, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai exposes memories through the very body of materiality itself.

Sophia Mai Brown, Saigon River II, 2025, Image courtesy of Phạm Hồ Chí Quốc

Fleshing out their own fantastical realms, Huyền Dương and Lê Nguyễn Minh Như show that to dream is not to escape reality, but to remain within it. Turning inward, their works carry fragments of materiality, memory and history into dreams. Smooth brushstrokes masking layers of dark colors, Huyền Dương constructs absurdly flat worlds where tomorrow is still today, mountain is equal to tree, and oracles from 6PM sleeps are delivered through human-faced creatures and upside-down fallen angels. A humorous desacralization, she lays bare the clashes of Western and Asian aesthetic structures, affirming absurdity manifests both reality and fantasy. Lê Nguyễn Minh Như traces back the journey of being in the world and post-production society through the chain of Buddhism dependent origination. Treating silk both as a fragile surface and a land of accumulation, where every intervention leaves a trace that cannot be erased, she lays down dense passages of color, sharply meta lines and a samsara of relations. Coiling, intersecting and persisting, causes and conditions interchangeably weave together through a collection of semi-realistic fragments. As life threads through the log inside the claw machine, she exposes birth as a process of production, where desire is shaped before a life begins.

Obliquely mysterious, playful and sometimes poignant, yet more truthful than any master narrative, their paintings offer fiction and fractions as ways of archiving and existing otherwise.