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Gift vouchers are 950,000vnd or $45 per person and can be purchased for individuals or groups. If you would like to book a private tour please get in contact for rates and availability.

For HCMC residents the vouchers will be delivered to your door, for those outside of Vietnam please contact me for payment and delivery details. All gift vouchers will come in my specially designed card (shown above)

Tours run from Tuesday to Saturday, 9am – 1pm. All tours are in English.

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email: sophiesarttour@gmail.com

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San Art, an independent, artist-run exhibition space and reading room located in Ho Chi Minh City, recently set up Laboratory, the first first home-grown ‘studio/residence’ programme in Vietnam. A nationwide call for applications resulted in three candidates being chosen.

For the previous six months they have lived and worked together in Ho Chi Minh City. Laboratory is aptly named – here they encourage artists to experiment with new materials and reflect on their own practice. The following images are a showcase 6 months of artwork production and experimentation. Each month the artists were joined by an established international artist to live with them and mentor them.

Tuấn Mami has immersed himself in the everyday city life of Saigon, carefully collecting a plethora of used objects that have been forgotten by this city’s residents. His works question the permanence and impermanence of man, object and beast and what they need to survive.

Trương Công Tùng takes the readily consumed media of film, reducing its presence and meaning to what he considers their basic form – color, shadow and light. His resulting sculptures and video works illustrate this artist’s ongoing study of the meaning of time and space, what is real and what is imagined.

Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai takes the invasive instruments of a gynecologist and has turned them into wondrous objects of fancy. Examining the ways in which man and science perceive the female body as both vessel of life and sexualized body, Mai questions her own relationship to flesh and beauty. Confronted by the density of image and language in daily life.

Tuấn Mami (b. 1981, Hanoi) has a BA in Art Pedagogy, Hanoi Fine Art University and currently lives and works in Hanoi. Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai (b. 1983, Hanoi) is a graduate of Traditional Decoration, Applied Arts, Hue Fine Arts University and currently lives and works in Hue. Trương Công Tùng (b. 1986, Daklak) has a BA in Lacquer Painting, Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts University and currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.

Sophie’s Art Tour has been listed on CNN Go’s ‘Insider Guide: What to do in Vietnam’. Click on this link to read more.

Sophie’s Art Tour is currently taking bookings, please get in contact to find out available dates. For more information about the tour click here, for more information about booking a place click here.

Dewey Ambrosino and Tam Van Tran are friends from L.A, practically neighbors Dewey tells me at the opening reception of their collaborative exhibition at Sàn Art.

The exhibition comprises of a conversation between their works, Ambrosino’s is metallic, pulsing and noisy and Tam’s is quiet, natural and static.

Ambrosino is also a DJ and a fan of Dubstep, a genre of music with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns. When you dance to it you hear it but you also feel it reverberating in your stomach and your chest in a deep wobbling drawl.

He wanted to re-create this feeling and make it visual so he made a 17 minute piece of music, placed a sheet of reflective mylar in front of a big speaker and let the sound waves make the shapes. ‘It’s really simple, that’s what is so beautiful about it’ says Dewey as one of the guests on my art tour remarked on her intense experience with the work.

When you turn around to face Tam’s work the deep tremors are still moving through your gut but you start to see a different scene altogether, a glinting watery reflection on the wall that dances around the cast shadows from towers of coconut trunks, charred wood and round receptacles molded from the inside of watermelons.

Tam Van Tran (b. 1966, Kontum, Vietnam) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. He received a BFA in Painting, Pratt Institute, New York in 1990. Tran’s artistic practice demonstrates his inter-disciplinary studies, often using unconventional materials to mark the transient nature of the tangible and intangible world.

Dewey Ambrosino (b. 1967, Chicago, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. He received a BFA in Sculpture and Industrial Design from University of Illinois, Chicago in 1991 and an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts in 1994. Ambrosino’s artistic practice examines the relationship between aesthetic phenomena and cultural conditioning through a variety of different media.
‘A Two-Person Show: Tam Van Tran and Dewey Ambrosino’
Sàn Art, 3 Me Linh street, district Binh Thanh, HCMC, Vietnam
June 1st – July 5th 2012
Tuesday – Saturday: 10am – 6.30pm
www.san-art.org

‘Transformative Disguise’ is Lê Hoàng Bích Phượng’s first solo exhibition. Composed of 9 new paintings and 5 ceramic sculptures, this exhibition plays with ideas of reflection, transparency and transformation, inviting the viewer to contemplate their own awareness of their behavior and actions, to question what kinds of attitudes they wear as masks to cope in everyday life.

‘Man I have met’ by Lê Hoàng Bích Phượng

In the world of Le Hoang Bich Phuong, the wearing of costume, particularly the mask, enters her urban everyday, where portraits of herself, friends and strangers – both real and imagined – morph with the traits of various cultural animal stereotypes. In her art, friends cheat on lovers; insecure others seek the identity of fame; and her own childhood dreams of life conflict with her present reality. With this intimate knowledge Phuong creates her own mythology, with watercolor on silk and glaze on ceramic, casting a set of personal heroes that merge human with the beast.

‘Xoi Thit (A Red Nose)’ by Lê Hoàng Bích Phượng

Le Hoang Bich Phuong is a young master of watercolor. Trained in the art of oil painting and compelled by the symbolic narrative of the Japanese tradition of ukiyo-e, Phuong’s compositions gracefully employ the subtle boldness of line and color gradation found in silk masterpieces by Nguyen Phan Chanh, and the humorous frivolity of Utagawa. Phuong’s characters float on raw silk, her near ethereal use of color giving the sense that these are ghostly figures of questionable earthly substance, the eyes, hands, mouth and ears of each figure deliberately pronounced in more intense hue and gesture.

'Whispering' by Lê Hoàng Bích Phượng

This exhibition plays with ideas of reflection, transparency and transformation, inviting the viewer to contemplate their own awareness of their behavior and actions, to question what kinds of attitudes they wear as masks to cope in everyday life.

Pictures provided by Sàn Art. Words by Zoe Butt

‘A Transformative Disguise: Lê Hoàng Bích Phượng’
Sàn Art, 3 Me Linh street, district Binh Thanh, HCMC, Vietnam
April 26th – May 25th 2012
Tuesday – Saturday: 10am – 6.30pm
www.san-art.org

This traveling exhibition is co-produced with the Japan Foundation and will open in Hanoi from the 28 June – 27 July, 2012.
27 Quang Trung, Hoan Kiem, Hanoi.
Opening hours: Daily from 9.30am – 6.00pm

Last night artist collective ‘The Propeller Group’ spoke about their solo exhibition Static Friction. The event took place at Galerie Quynh; one of the two spaces to host the exhibition, the other being Sàn Art. The exhibition comprises entirely of new works including sculpture, drawing, video, and mixed media collages revolving around motorbike culture in Vietnam.

Matt Lucero talking about Static Friction in front of graphite on paper portraits of drag racing motorbikes

‘Static Friction’ explores the motorbike as it is experienced in Vietnam – “as an icon of social and economic mobility; a vehicle for individual identity amid social collectivity; a machine for a lawless subculture obsessed with speed and violence; and as a classic symbol of an historical era. Though the exhibition is rooted in the context of Vietnam where over 85% of the population use motorbikes as their chief mode of transport, the central theme highlights broader issues related to globalism, identity, transgression, urban and economic growth” The Propeller Group

Programme Manager Trần Minh Đức at Sàn Art in front of Static Friction: Burning Rubber

The Propeller Group
The Propeller Group, formed in 2006 by Phunam (born 1974), Matt Lucero (born 1976), and Tuan Andrew Nguyen (born 1976), have exhibited in numerous exhibitions regionally and internationally, including ‘The Ungovernables’ at The New Museum, New York (2012); ‘Video, An Art, A History 1965 – 2010. A Selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum Collections’ at the Singapore Art Museum (2011); and ‘Commercial Break’ presented by Garage Projects at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Forthcoming exhibitions include ‘Six Lines of Flight’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and ‘Made in LA’, LA Biennial, Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Static Friction: Burning Rubber at Sàn Art

Galerie Quynh
65 De Tham Street, District 1 , Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Tel/Fax: +84 8 3836 8019 – Email: lisa@galeriequynh.com; tung@galeriequynh.com
Exhibition Dates: 5 April – 21 April 2012
Gallery Hours: 10 AM – 6 PM
Tuesday – Saturday and by appointment on Sundays and Mondays

Sàn Art
3 Me Linh Street, District Binh Thanh, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam
Tel: +84 (0)8 3840 0898 – Email: hello@san-art.org
Exhibition Dates: March 30 – April 20, 2012
Gallery Hours: 10.30 AM – 6.30 PM                                                                                Tuesday – Saturday