A SUNDAY IN SUMMER

Opening party: 5.30 PM, Sunday 21 June 2026
On display: 11.00 – 19.00, Tuesday – Sunday, from 22 June to 12 July 2026
Manzi Exhibition Space, 2 Hàng Bún Alley, Ba Đình, Hanoi
Free admission

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"For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Eight (Borgeby gård, Sweden, August 12, 1904), 

trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984)

'a sunday in summer' by Kim Duy opens onto the silence of a strange experience like that. Without striving for a consolidated scenario, a legible narrative, or a sharp manifesto, Manzi invites you to step in and sit with something subtle and provoking

Gathering practices scattered across more than fifteen years—painting, photography, video, and installation—Kim Duy's body of work at Manzi resembles a kind of non-deliberate experiment, in which the absence of a rationally plotted plan opens up a play with the drifting and meaning-making potential of signs. Lines and colours break free from their descriptive function; language is transcribed until it can no longer be read, leaving only visual traces shaped by the rhythm of a repeated act; an abstract concept restructured into millions of letter combinations that shapes forms and corporeal presence, and ink marks in the palm of a hand being preserved and left to fade gradually through daily life, through water, through air, through sweat… Drawing is also Writing. Recording is simultaneously Erasure. Each work in 'a sunday in summer', however different in subject and material, tests painting against the impulse of chance and the slow kneading of time.

Like leafing through a long-unread notebook while tracing and finding new meaning in fragments of signs, Kim Duy's 'a sunday in summer'' is a pursuit of images and ideas—catching them, then letting them slip away: thoughts already passed, notions just taking shape, or something that may only be an illusion still flickering faintly in the distance.