The exhibition unfolds as a space where imagination is carried across generations, where each work holds a fragment of memory, a longing, and a possibility not yet fully formed. Within this artistic garden, the artists do not tell a single shared story, but instead create a polyphonic field of feeling, rich with layered sensibilities.
Dream of Dreams brings together eight Vietnamese artists: Trần Nguyên Đán, Trần Văn Mãng, Phan Thanh Bình, Trần Anh Huy, Nguyễn Vũ Lân, Hoàng Đăng Khanh, Lê Hữu Long and Lê Thừa Hải in a contemplative exhibition at Boi Tran Garden. Conceived not as a narrative but as a state of presence, the exhibition unfolds through subtle correspondences between works, where memory, imagination and painting converge. Each practice remains singular, yet together they form a quiet continuum, like images that return, transform and persist across time.
In October 2017, Mr Zhang Zhi Yong, President of the Shanghai Pujiang Southeast Asia Culture and Art Exchange Center, and Mrs Zhang Jing came to Boi Tran Garden to celebrate Boi Tran’s solo exhibition Le Rêve Qui Veille (The Watchful Dream). Their visit reflected a larger conversation between Hue, Shanghai, and the growing international regard for Vietnamese art.
There is no place without a history. There is no history without a place. There are places without measure, and histories beyond all time. Elegant moments and secret places. Patches of eternity and jolted thoughts. To verify this, one must know Boi Tran.
In 2016, during the 250th anniversary year of Christie's, a landmark sale devoted to Vietnamese art was presented in Hong Kong under the title Se Souvenir Des Belles Choses. Among those contributing behind the scenes was Thuc Doan, recognised as the first Vietnamese woman to assist Christie’s in such a capacity as translator, advisor and cultural interlocutor.
Boi Tran Art Gallery is honoured to support the group exhibition “Chòn Chòn,” as part of its sustained engagement in nurturing younger generations of artists and contributing to a broader ecosystem in which contemporary Vietnamese art continues to evolve and expand.
In Boi Tran’s world, women remember, flowers grieve, and colour becomes memory. Her art blooms quietly, rooted in loss, yet radiant with grace. “She has grown accustomed to finding joy in the midst of fatigue,” she once said. And from that quiet strength, her beauty endures.
Boi Tran, with a sensible heart and the gifted talent of an artist, fully perceives the artistic and literary beauty of nature that comes right out from her magnificent garden and then conveys that beauty most aesthetically to her works.
At Minh Chau Gallery, Vietnam’s great masters spoke in small, tender strokes: portraits, landscapes, memories distilled to palm-sized grace. Amid them, Boi Tran’s presence shimmered like silk: luminous, gentle, quietly enduring. These were more than paintings. They were moments held close. Echoes of beauty that linger in stillness.
In each small frame, a world unfolds: tender, intimate, and quietly profound. From Bui Xuan Phai’s ink-drawn matchbox portraits to Nguyen Trung’s reflective sketches, these miniature masterpieces speak not of scale, but of soul. Rooted in centuries of artistic tradition, yet wholly Vietnamese in spirit, they remind us that greatness often comes gently, in the smallest of gestures.
