Being Seen in the Wrong Category (and Liking It) - Special Recognition at the 15th All Women Art Exhibition (2026)
- Gối
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
I submitted this series knowing it didn’t belong.
The work was loud, neon-heavy, slightly inappropriate. Women rendered with sensuality, city pop colors, a kind of heat that leans closer to desire than decorum. It didn’t resemble the restrained, old-school aesthetic that usually defines this gallery. Honestly, that was why I hesitated. Not because I doubted the work, but because I already knew the answer the system tends to give when something doesn’t fit neatly.
Still, I submitted. Not out of hope, but out of calculation.
At a certain point, when you’re building an artist-led brand, validation becomes less about ego and more about efficiency. External recognition costs less than advertising. A line of credit, if earned honestly, saves you money later. That quiet logic was there—alongside a private confidence I rarely say out loud: I don’t need approval, but I know when it’s useful.
The series itself circles around a single obsession: nostalgia for a city that no longer exists, yet refuses to disappear. Saigon before 1975—messy, sensual, contradictory—still lingers beneath the concrete and glass. All three works carry that same tension. A city overheating, socially and emotionally. A softness trapped inside compression.
The selected piece, The Hot & Hotter Seasons, is the most restrained of the three. Almost ironically so.
In Saigon, people joke that there are only two seasons: hot and hotter. In this work, heat becomes more than climate. It becomes pressure. A society that appears open, colorful, permissive—but remains internally constrained. Nothing breaks, yet everything tightens.
The female figure at the center is deliberately fragile. She carries the memory of a bourgeois elegance that no longer has space in the city’s current rhythm. Around her, neon structures swirl, synthetic and unstable. A cat and a mouse exist side by side without conflict, without care. Emotional flatness as a survival strategy. Tang ping, but localized—detachment not as rebellion, but as necessity.
The gallery chose this piece, I suspect, because she is clothed.
That detail still makes me smile. Out of a series where bodies are exposed, suggestive, unapologetic, the work that passed through the institutional filter was the one that behaved. Fully dressed. Presentable. Safe enough.
And yet, somehow, it was placed under Photography & Digital — Special Recognition.
Not an illustration. Not a category it could be comfortably archived in.
I like that.
Special recognition (art exhibition) implies a crack in the system. An acknowledgment that the work didn’t comply with existing boxes, but was impossible to ignore. It wasn’t awarded because it followed rules. It was noticed because it didn’t.
I prefer that kind of recognition. Being misfiled, slightly misunderstood, but still taken seriously. Being seen without being absorbed.
In the end, this wasn’t about winning. It was about presence. About allowing work that feels out of place to register anyway. And about confirming something I already suspected: sometimes the most effective way to move forward isn’t to fit in, but to be inconvenient—quietly, and on record.
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