Open Kitchen 003 - Other Tongue
Open Kitchen 002 - Fusion
Open Kitchen 001 - Assembly
Other Curatorial Projects
Christ, Buddha, and the Jigsaw
Internet Archaeology
Split Level
The Duet’s Carnival
Tone Check: The Skins of Korean Contemporary Painting
At-Will Adaptation: The Exhibition, A Residency-then-Exhibition
At-Will Adaptation: The Residency, A Residency-then-Exhibition
(In)directions: Queerness in Chinese Contemporary Photography
Alienation ?
TRACES
Stephanie Creaghan: The Crumbs of Our Time
Bui Thanh Tam: Outside In
Jenny Jisun Kim: Verses on Oxherding
A New Topology in Chinese and Vietnamese Contemporary Photography
Hot Coffee conversation, Anh Nguyen, Felisa Nguyen, and Huyen Tran
A Mirrored Interview
The Estate of Joshua Caleb Weibley at CHART Gallery asks if we still want to play
Hyeejin Bae: Eye Candy
Nomad Photography
queerness, chinese, contemporary, photography, (in)directions
Cynthia Gutiérrez at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
Wu Chi-Tsung solo exhibition at Katina Museum of Art
Xiong Wei: Becoming the Masses Amongst Elites
What has to be NFT’d?
Jean-Luc Moulène Solo Exhibition at Miguel Aubrey Gallery
Yoan Capote Solo Exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery
Take a Step: Phil Zheng Cai on the Opening of M+ Museum
A co-curation with Richard Vine
This exhibition was presented GateGate Gallery at Chillala House of Art from November 15 – 24, 2025.
Catalog essay “Bùi Thanh Tâm—Outside In”
Exhibition Review
“Maximum Projection and Maximum Refinement”: An Approach to Art by Curator Phil Zheng Cai, Tatler Asia
Violence, Salvation and “Seeing the World Through One Eye” by Artist Bui Thanh Tam, Tatler Asia
In Ho Chi Minh City, Art Feels Urgent Again, Review of Bui Thanh Tam - Christ, Buddha, and the Jigsaw, Observer
Gate Gate Gallery is pleased to present Christ, Buddha, and the Jigsaw, featuring nearly 50 new works by Hanoi-based artist Bùi Thanh Tâm, on view November 15-24 at the Chillala House of Art, HCMC. Dating from 2020 to the present, the selection includes paintings, 2D multiples, and sculptures that exemplify Tâm’s globalism, his interest in both tradition and current technology, and his engagement with vital themes including war and peace, appropriation, media overload, and spiritualism in the East and West.
Well known for such painting series as “Crazy People” (2010-14) and “Young Vietnamese Girl” (2010-17), both satirizing the contemporary collision of local values and global pop culture in Asia, Tâm has devoted the last five years to developing a broader, indeed worldwide, social purview and experimenting with digital image production.
Christ, Buddha, and the Jigsaw is the first exhibition to combine Tâm’s multiples on paper with several collaged paintings from which those works derive. The artist’s process consists of painting key images—Christ, Buddha, the Statue of Liberty, skulls, eyeballs—often juxtaposing or superimposing them, adding layers of folk imagery from the woodblock repertory of northern Vietnam’s Đông Hồ, Kim Hoàng, and Hàng Trống villages, cutting the surfaces into jigsaw puzzle shapes, and replacing some of the pieces with other materials. The paintings are then photographed, manipulated using digital apps, and printed out as multiples—suggesting how difficult it now is to put together a single coherent identity. In addition, the sculptures on view in this show comprise bomb-like forms and chess pieces: three-dimensional metaphors for today’s nuclear gamesmanship.
Tâm’s technique at once employs and critiques cultural appropriation—of which Vietnam, like every country of the formerly colonial Indochina region, has been both a victim and a beneficiary. Moreover, the dialogue between his “original” paintings and their “foster” multiples resonates with a number of much-debated philosophical issues: Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the “cult value” of unique artworks and the more populist “exhibition value” of mass reproduced images, Plato’s separation of the ideal World of Forms from the mundane World of Appearances, Buddhism’s divorce between a serene inner truth and the chaos of samsara and the Veil of Maya, and the Christian mystery of transubstantiation linking the material and the divine.
The Gate Gate Gallery exhibition, held at the Chillala House of Art, is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by co-curators Phil Zheng Cai, curator, writer, and partner of Eli Klein Gallery, New York, and art critic Richard Vine, former managing editor of Art in America.
Bùi Thanh Tâm, born 1979, graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts with a BA in painting in 2009. He lives and works in Hanoi, and has shown at Eli Klein Gallery, New York, and at other venues in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong, as well as art fairs in Jakarta, Seoul, Taipei, and Beijing. His awards include prizes from the Korean Cultural Center and the National Literary and Arts Association, both in Hanoi.
All installation shots by Nguyen Hoang Ngan