HCM CITY — Three internationally exhibited contemporary artists – Đinh Công Đạt, Rodney Dickson and Nguyễn Trinh Thi – come together in The Figure and the Void exhibition that is being held at An Fine Art Gallery in HCM City.

Working across sculpture, painting, moving image, sound and installation, the three artists represent distinct generations, cultural backgrounds and artistic practices.

Curated by New York-based art critic Richard Vine, former Managing Editor of Art in America, the exhibition brings these differences into dialogue through a shared consideration of presence and absence, the visible and invisible and the relationship between human form and the space that surrounds it.

Art students learn early on to render both subject and ground, giving equal attention to objects and the space around them making them see and think about, both presence and absence simultaneously.

In The Figure and the Void, three global contemporary artists – two Vietnamese, one Irish-American, all internationally exhibited, transform this standard visual exercise into a metaphysical theme.

Đạt, alarmed by the lack of desire and commitment that he observes in young people today, crafts mid-sized fiberglass and ceramic figures embodying a stylised alienation.

In all Đạt’s groupings, any sense of social cohesion resides merely in the members’ similarities of body language and attire.

Each figure, in contrast, appears dazed and entirely self-contained, as though numb to social companions and the wider environment. This psychic dissociation, going beyond the awkward unease of the 'lonely crowd' syndrome, invites us to see these stunned characters as lost souls who superficially, but desperately, conform to collective identity.

Meanwhile, the focus of Dickson’s subjects is fixed on the beyond. Even as their eyes meet ours, the distinct individuals in around 100 full-length portraits painted on strips of bed sheeting, a few men and many women, all friends of the artist from around the world, seem to stare through the viewer to an encompassing emptiness.

While the faces are instantly recognisable and compelling, the bodies and clothing have a ghostly transparency.

The images’ graphic black and white contours and rough paint handling with occasional touches of colour, all intentionally flat and deceptively simple, stress the tension between free-floating human consciousness and its confinement within a body, a social role, a specific place and time.

Like memento mori, these pictures, created to epitomise the presence of the artist’s friends, also memorialise their absence. Even when the strips are crowded together or overlapping like jostled city dwellers, each personage seems poised between presence and disappearance.

For Thi, the idea of presence and absence is embedded in the site itself. Her mixed-media installation is conceived specifically for An Fine Art Gallery on Đồng Khởi Street, drawing on the site’s connection to Sài Gòn’s former cinema culture and the building’s own past as an old cinema.

Using films shot in HCM City (formerly Sài Gòn) since the 1950s, together with sounds from different periods, Thi allows images of the past to travel through time and return to the place they once represented.

Streets, buildings and people that are no longer there become temporarily present again through moving image and sound. Rather than treating presence and absence as opposites, the work suggests that one exists through the other: what has disappeared continues to leave traces, while what is present is itself continually passing into memory. The site, its history and its changing light thus become part of the artwork itself.

For the show’s curator, New York-based art critic Richard Vine, the works of Đạt, Dickson, and Thi suggest a debate between Eastern spiritualism and Western existentialist thought, between the presence and the absence. 

Đạt participated in the National Sculpture Exhibition in 1993 and earned a BA in sculpture from the Việt Nam Fine Art University in 1994. A designer and event producer as well as an artist, he is a member of the Việt Nam Fine Arts Association and has shown internationally at venues including Fielding Lecht Gallery, Austin; Bankside Gallery, London; and Iskandar Gallery, Dubai; among others

Dickson, born in Northern Ireland and raised during the Troubles, graduated from the Liverpool College of Art in 1983 and moved to New York in 1997. He has received a John Moores Exhibition Prize and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants. Dickson has previously shown at the Hồ Chí Minh City Museum of Fine Arts and other venues in Southeast Asia and is currently represented by Nunu Fine Art in Taipei and New York.

Thi, a pioneer in experimental film and video in Việt Nam, holds a BA from Hà Nội  Foreign Studies College and master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Iowa and international relations from the University of California, San Diego. Her works have been shown in major international exhibitions including the Bienal de São Paulo, documenta, Artes Mundi, Lyon Biennale, Asia Pacific Triennial, and Biennale of Sydney. 

Vine is a New York-based art critic, curator, and author, and the former Managing Editor of Art in America. His books include New China, New Art (2008), SoHo Sins (2016), and Liu Shiming: Sculpting Empathy (2026). He has curated exhibitions in Beijing, New Delhi, San Antonio, and New York.

The Figure and the Void exhibition runs until September 30. — VNS