Vincom Center for Contemporary Art

In "Tái chất Hoàn sinh – Vật chất Tái sinh – Materia Renata", Nguyễn Quốc Dân presents a visceral meditation on the afterlife of matter. In a world saturated with excess—of production, consumption, and cultural amnesia—he turns to the discarded not as waste, but as fertile ground for aesthetic, ecological, and existential renewal. Through sculpture and painting, Dân reanimates plastic debris and textile waste—materials steeped in histories of violence, labor, and abandonment—into vivid, unruly terrains of color and form. These works do not mourn what has been lost; they carry it forward. The fragments return not as ghosts, but as vessels of memory and persistence.

The exhibition unfolds in two intertwined bodies of work. The first gathers weathered plastic washed ashore and buried in the soil of Central Vietnam—remnants softened by time, salt, and sun, touched by countless hands. These materials bear silent traces of use and neglect: the leftovers of domestic life, of survival, of invisible labor. The second body of work draws from the fashion industry’s discarded skins—synthetic fabrics, factory offcuts, and chromatic waste. These materials, symbols of fast beauty and slow decay, are layered into volatile, tactile compositions. But beneath the kaleidoscopic surfaces, a subtle and recurring presence emerges: the human figure. Often obscured, fragmented, or fused into its surroundings, the body appears both as origin and residue—always there, never central.

In this dual emergence of matter and figure, "Tái chất Hoàn sinh – Vật chất Tái sinh – Materia Renata" opens onto a larger cosmological and philosophical field. “All things flow,” wrote Heraclitus, “nothing abides.” The Latin phrase materia renata—“reborn matter”—echoes ancient understandings of time not as linear progress but as cycle: of formation, erosion, and return. Dân’s work enacts this principle not metaphorically but materially. These aren’t simply works about transformation—they are transformation itself. Each piece performs a ritual of resurrection, asking what our culture is willing to cast off, and what it insists on forgetting.

To engage with Nguyễn Quốc Dân’s practice is to confront the inseparability of the human and the material. His figures are not simply made from waste—they are enmeshed within it, encased in synthetic skins, their gestures blurred into thread, fiber, and plastic limb. This entanglement resonates with philosopher Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter, the idea that even discarded things possess vitality and agency. “The image of inert matter,” she writes, “feeds human hubris… by preventing us from detecting the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations.” In Dân’s hands, waste is not lifeless—it is willful, breathing, unfinished.

There is mourning here, too. An ecological grief courses through the work—not just for environments degraded, but for lives and labors folded into those environments. Dân’s human forms do not rise above the material—they are saturated by it, embedded within it. These are not heroes but survivors, archetypes for the Anthropocene: an epoch in which humanity’s impact scars not just landscapes, but imagination. The works do not preach—they witness. They do not transcend—they endure.

Yet even this grief is tempered by something older, and perhaps more sacred: the possibility of rebirth. In Buddhist thought, rebirth is not a singular return, but a continuum of cause and effect—a karmic unfolding, where each action shapes the next cycle of life. Dân honors this principle in process and form. His works do not seek purification. They embrace contradiction. Destruction and beauty, waste and meaning, coexist in fragile equilibrium. These are not clean objects. But they are honest ones.

There is also a Nietzschean impulse in Dân’s confrontation with decay. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: “You must be willing to burn yourself in your own flame—how could you become new if you had not first become ashes?” Dân’s artworks emerge from precisely this gesture. They do not sanitize the narrative of consumption. They ignite it—and out of the burn, something incandescent takes shape.

For years, Nguyễn Quốc Dân has referred to his style as Anti-Cubism (Phi Lập Thể)—a personal visual language forged through working with colored wires, industrial detritus, and unconventional geometries. But here, in "Tái chất Hoàn sinh – Vật chất Tái sinh – Materia Renata", it becomes more than style—it becomes a stance. One that refuses hierarchy, resists categorization, and asserts the value of what has been overlooked. These works ask us to see again: not just to notice the discarded, but to recognize within it a kind of defiant aliveness. A pulse beneath the plastic.

Ultimately, "Tái chất Hoàn sinh – Vật chất Tái sinh – Materia Renata" is a radical reconsideration of what it means to begin again. In a world shaped by acceleration and abandonment, Dân’s works do not merely recycle—they resurface. They resurrect. And they leave us with vital questions: What is lost in our rush to move forward? What might it mean to carry the cast-off with us, not as burden, but as kin?

In their tangled surfaces of conflict and chroma, Dân’s figures remind us that rebirth is never pristine. But it is real. And in its messy, luminous honesty—it is deeply, unforgettably human.

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