"Intermission", solo exhibition. Gate Gate Gallery, HCM City, Vietnam. 2026.
"Intermission" is Hai Hoang's second solo exhibition, presenting a shift in his artistic direction. Featuring 11 paintings, varying in size but unified in colour and technique, Hai depicts quiet, reminiscent scenes of small, lonely figures or animals in fictional landscapes. Influenced by the Symbolist movements, historical objects, and magical realism, Hai's paintings put viewers in a dream-like realm that at its core, expresses his innermost humanist tendencies.
From the organiser:
Gate Gate Gallery is pleased to present “Intermission”, Hai Hoang (Hoàng Long Hải)’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view from March 12 to May 3, 2026, “Intermission” features a new body of paintings, beginning with material experimentation: oil paint thinned with turpentine and oil-based medium to form translucent layers that bleed, pool, and settle in unpredictable manners across the canvas. Working with dilution and accumulation rather than density, Hai allows material behaviour to guide his imagery. Depth emerges through layering when each pass of paint leaves behind visual and emotional residue.
“You misinterpret everything, even the silence.”
Franz Kafka, ‘The Castle’
Gate Gate Gallery is pleased to present Intermission, Hai Hoang (Hoàng Long Hải)’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a new body of paintings, the exhibition begins with material experimentation: oil paint thinned with turpentine and oil-based medium to form translucent layers that bleed, pool, and settle in unpredictable manners across the canvas. Working with dilution and accumulation rather than density, Hai allows material behaviour to guide his imagery. Depth emerges through layering when each pass of paint leaves behind visual and emotional residue.
Hai Hoang does not hide his idealistic worldview. In his paintings, worlds blend into one another to form an undisturbed realm populated by small, recurring inhabitants–crows, figurines, houses, pine trees, lakes, and rivers. This is, however, nowhere near blind optimism. It is marked by silence and solemnity: the silence of childhood, the silence of the mind, and a silence increasingly at risk of disappearance in this social reality. Hai constructs his own silence in a bustling world. His paintings depict figures or objects immersed in thoughts, or in the feeling of thinking about what they are thinking.
It is from this suspended state that the material structure of his paintings takes shape. The act of diluting paint and allowing it to spread, stain, overlap mirrors the way ideas form through hesitation, repetition, and layering. Images emerge gradually as layers accumulate. Each layer carries traces of earlier gestures for visual depth to unfold in parallel to emotional depth. Contemplation becomes both a theme and working method. When the paintings reach a dead-end, Hai spends long periods observing, taking notes, and waiting for direction. The works inherit conversational aspects, they are full of thoughts, usually uncertain, but nonetheless they belong to the work and the work alone.
Pine trees appear in multiple paintings. Living long lives and surviving extreme weather, they are silent witnesses to a world in constant change. Time moves around them.
Ravens traditionally represent bad omen, but they are non-migratory birds, which makes them year-long residents of an area and in a way, protectors and watchers.
Lakes and rivers provide natural reflective surfaces, symbolizing contemplation, and sometimes, deception.
Set against these steady presences, the human figures in Hai’s paintings often appear carefree or adventurous. They move lightly around the space, seemingly unaware of the weight held by their surroundings. The environment observes, the figures wander.
What remains in between is the place for Hai’s idealism. This realm is a reminder that states of stillness and care continue to exist. When l’art pour l’art is treated as a closed principle, it ignores the fact that the artist as human being is informed by the world they inhabit; and if art is for art’s sake, the artist is at risk of being alienated from the very world that they take inspiration from. Memories operate under similar tensions–they are not static archives, distanced from material existence, but active mechanisms that provide either epiphanies or even deceptions. Memories are beautiful because we decided that they are, and Intermission speaks to this position.
Intermission is a period of pause between acts in a play, a temporary silence before the story goes on. The title reflects a state of remaining rather than resolving, of staying with uncertainty, melancholy, and quiet attention without seeking immediate clarity. Hai’s figurines, landscapes, and observers coexist in Intermission. What emerges is a gentle insistence on presence: an invitation to pause, to attend, and to consider what we are willing to hold. In Kafka’s world, silence is a weapon, but in Hai’s painting, silence is a home, a dwelling.
Words by Nguyễn Vũ Thiên An (Thea).
Hai Hoang (Hoàng Long Hải, b. 2003, Vietnam) is a painter based in London and Hanoi. Hai is a 2025 First Class graduate of Kingston School of Art, where he was nominated for the Freelands Painting Prize 2025. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the UK and Vietnam, including shows at Kingston School of Art (London), Gerald Moore Gallery (London), Studio 1.1 (London), Studio KT1 (London), Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA) (Hanoi), and 16 Ngo Quyen Fine Arts Gallery (Hanoi), where he debuted his solo exhibition “Glassy Figures” in 2021.