A group show in Hà Nội is giving six painters from Hải Phòng the chance to show how differently six people can interpret the same country. All share roots in Thành Đông, a historically cultured part of the port city, and all work in painting — but that's where the similarity ends. The exhibition, running until November 5 at 16 Ngô Quyền Street, gathers work in oil, lacquer, acrylic and silk, and the contrast between the artists is the point.
Phùng Văn Tuệ is the loosest of the six, stepping away from literal landscapes into expressionist and abstract territory. His paintings layer colours and broken, flowing lines into surfaces that hum with rhythm — his stated aim is to capture nature and people as they move through ordinary days, letting time do the editing. Lê Ngân Chi works in oil and acrylic, folding personal memory into palettes of blue, yellow, brown and white, with forms that drift rather than sit still.
Two of the group lean into Vietnam's most distinctive art form: lacquer. Nguyễn Hùng Cường uses traditional lacquer painting to dig into collective memory and cultural depth, while Phạm Đình Tùng contributes 13 lacquer pieces built from everyday subjects filtered through observation and imagination. Nguyễn Quang Hoan, meanwhile, paints his emotional reactions to nature directly.
Perhaps the most immediately appealing work for visitors is Nguyễn Tiến Quân's series Mùa Thu Vương Nắng (Autumn Bathed in Sunlight), acrylic canvases that chase the way light behaves in autumn — fluid blocks of colour and soft tonal shifts standing in for hours passing. His approach is simple: paint what he feels about people and nature.
For a traveller in Hà Nội, this is a good example of the city's strength as a place to see Vietnamese art outside the big commercial galleries. The venue on Ngô Quyền sits in the Ba Đình area, an easy detour between the Old Quarter and the museums around Hoàn Kiếm, and shows like this one — free of the gift-shop filter — are where you'll encounter Vietnamese lacquer painting on its own terms. Lacquer is worth understanding before you shop for it: the layering, sanding and polishing over weeks is what gives the medium its depth, and seeing contemporary artists push it in abstract or personal directions makes a souvenir feel far more meaningful.
The show also doubles as an introduction to Hải Phòng's art scene. Vietnam's main port city, barely two hours from Hà Nội by train, has a long cultural tradition that gets overshadowed by the capital and Huế. If the exhibition whets your appetite, the artists' home city — with its colonial opera house, strong coffee culture and gateway access to Cát Bà Island and Hạ Long Bay — makes a natural add-on to a northern Vietnam itinerary.
The exhibition runs until November 5 at 16 Ngô Quyền Street, Hà Nội.
