Ầu Ơ and the Foundations of Vietnamese Contemporary Art

The Foundations: Framing Vietnamese Contemporary Art

Vietnamese contemporary art can be traced to artists born in post-war Vietnam, roughly between 1975 and 1989. This generation, shaped by a country emerging from decades of war and isolation, built practices grounded in academic training yet searching for individual expression. Their work carries a visual intensity tied to the academic discipline and curriculum of the École des Beaux-Arts (1925). 

By contrast, artists born after 1989 grew up in Vietnam shaped by the Đổi Mới reforms. Many pursue international degrees, often beginning their studies in Vietnam before continuing in America or Europe. Their gaze, while still anchored in Vietnamese realities, frequently turns outward. They are fluent in global aesthetics and oriented toward transnational dialogues. This generational divide defines much of Vietnam’s current art ecology: one group consolidating local identity, the other positioning Vietnamese art within a global frame.

For collectors and institutions, this duality is central to understanding Vietnamese art today. It is both rooted and mobile, local and international, tradition-bound yet future-facing.

 
Why It Matters

Vietnamese art is too often framed reductively, either as nostalgic exotica or as peripheral to global discourse. My role is to mediate and contextualize, ensuring that collectors, curators, and institutions engage with the work on its own terms.

Supporting artists 

Many artists here operate outside of established gallery systems. I aim to create sustainable visibility without forcing premature market polish nor institutional packaging. Each acquisition is grounded in trust, dialogue, and long-term commitment.

BUILDING CONFIDENCE IN THE MARKET

Provenance, transparency, and context are non-negotiable. Collectors know where a work comes from, how it fits within an artist’s trajectory, and why it matters. This is how confidence is built not only in individual works, but in the long-term credibility of Vietnamese art as a market.

 
Vietnamese Contemporary Art and Its Evolution

Artists born after 1989 came of age in a Vietnam where American pop culture, consumer brands, and digital media entered daily life, while the physical landscape continued to shift. The coexistence of the global and the traditional shapes Vietnamese art today: dynamic, hybrid, disparate.

Alongside these generations are diasporic artists who left Vietnam as children or were born abroad. Their practices often explore memory, displacement, and history, remaining tied to Vietnam through subject matter, material, or recurring returns. 

 
Personal Foundation

In 2018, my mother acquired her first painting, a neo-expressionist work by Lê Thừa Hải at VICAS in Hanoi. Through close relationships with artists, studio visits, and regular salons, she built an archive that has since become the foundation for Ầu Ơ Collection, now comprising over 100 works by 45 artists.

My own entry into the art world was shaped through work across institutions and galleries. At 201@105 in New York, under Toma Fichter (formerly of the Met, Morgan Library, Neue Galerie, and Paula Cooper), I learned to see art as a system of relationships, not just objects. A subsequent role at the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi deepened my grounding in Vietnam’s academic and institutional structures. In 2025, I joined Vin Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, an international program rooted in academic rigor, which marked a formal step in bridging local practices with global dialogue.

 
Conclusion

In a global market increasingly hungry for authenticity, Ầu Ơ presents what is real — works grounded in history, context, and connection. We invest in artistic vision and Vietnam’s art ecosystem, while documenting how it's seen and collected.

The objective is to equip collectors with the tools to recognize value beyond speculation, insights into market dynamics, pricing, and collecting practices, providing the grounding needed to make informed and confident acquisitions.

 

Text by Karlie Ho

 

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September 15, 2025