There is a new art space in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City’s posh Thao Dien neighborhood called Chillala, which is currently hosting an exhibition by the mid-career Saigonese painter Hoàng Nam Việt.
His first major solo show to date, the exhibit is titled Individuality & Duality: A Manifesto by Hoàng Nam Việt.
Curated by the California based artist and educator Brian Doan (known in Saigon for his work with the influential Xem Photography Collective), the show principally features sketchy figurative oil paintings in blue, with Viet’s signature grisaille—a painting technique that use only shades of a single color including some of Viet’s largest paintings to date, which is fitting since the ground floor white cube gallery at Chillala has 6.8 meter high walls, instantly making it one of the most impressive exhibition spaces in Vietnam.
The extra large paintings were produced in just a matter of weeks for this exhibition, and like many of the works in the show, they are painted in blue monochrome with just the occasional color embellishment — such as the the glowing red ember at the tip of a cigarette in the giant vertical diptych Một Phong Cảnh Chân Dung (2025). It reads as a straightforward portrait of a young man at first glance, until you notice that there is a ghostly figure occluding one of the eyes, contorting the composition and defying easy interpretation. The title translates as “A Landscape Portrait,” which is cryptic, given that it is ostensibly a facial portrait, in the vertical “portrait” orientation.
In another large scale blue painting titled Đời Nhẹ Khôn Kham (2025) (titled after the iconic 1984 novel by the Czech-French author Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), we see the back of a naked woman sitting at the edge of a bathtub, which turns out to be a recurring trope throughout the show. Look closer and you see that the woman has a tattoo on her back of the Greek goddess Diana, stark naked shooting bow and arrow. Diana is the goddess of the hunt, and there is a myth in which a human hunter sneaks up and spies on her as she and her nymphs bathe nude in a forest pool. To punish the man, she transforms him into a stag, and his own hunting dogs chase him down and rip him limb from limb. Notably, there is a dog standing at the foot of the bathtub, but it is wearing a human mask.
The uncanny dog with the mask appears repeatedly throughout the new blue works, prodding us to ponder the conflicted morals of the human animal — and there is another dog in the painting YOU WANT IT DARKER (2023), which is also unsettling, but for totally different reasons. In this painting the dog lies on an operating table with its feet in the air, and we can see that it is a female, presumably undergoing a neutering operation.
More paintings greet you in the stairwell as you hoof it to the top floor, where Chillala has another, smaller, but equally sleek white cube exhibition space, and a rooftop balcony with a bar, open from 6 pm till late every night.
While some of the paintings in the stairwell and upstairs are still in Việt’s blue grisaille style (including a small but striking portrait in blue of the activist Trần Huỳnh Duy Thức, who recently got released from prison), there are also works with more complex color schemes, characterized by murky blues, greens, yellows and browns.
Some of the works upstairs continue the Catholic theme, such as Thiên Thần Trong Xưởng Vẽ (2024) (e.g. “Angel In The Studio”), an image of a faceless woman with her arms outstretched in a cross configuration, painted in the self-explanatory color scheme of Việt’s “Blue and Gold” series.
Other works continued the Greco-Roman theme, with a couple paintings of women lacking arms as in ancient statuary, and a standout canvas titled Sysiphus (2024), in which a nude man carries a bathtub just like Atlas with the world on his back, instead of Sysiphus pushing his boulder uphill. Someone might be riding in the tub, giving an amusing contemporary twist to the Sisyphian myth.
In contrast to the heavy spiritual and mythological themes, other works simply feature portraits of friends and lovers, or scenes of bohemian life in Ho Chi Minh City — such as CÁI TAM GIÁC THỨ 2 (2020), which could translate as “THE SECOND TRIANGLE,” featuring the artist known as Mr. Bambi — and K.T. #03 (2017), in which a woman’s cheeks are affectionately squeezed by a hand that reaches from out of frame, her lips puckered in a moody pout.
The exhibition strikes a balance between playfulness and depth, marking a watershed moment in the career of a significant Saigon artist and putting Chillala on the map as an important new space for art in Vietnam.
It remains on view until July 16th, and Hoàng Nam Việt has taken up temporary residence in the center of the downstairs gallery, where he has set up a temporary studio, and you can watch him paint the Saigon Blues.
About Individuality & Duality Exhibtion
- Date: July 4th — July 16, 2025
- Location: Chillala House of Art, 75 Xuân Thủy, Phường Thảo Điền, TP. Thủ Đức, TP. Hồ Chí Minh