In Ho Chi Minh City, Art Feels Urgent Again

“Christ, Buddha, and the Jigsaw” by Bùi Thanh Tâm

Presented by Gate Gate Gallery at the art space Chillala House of Art, Hanoi-based artist Bùi Thanh Tâm pushes his long-standing fascination with global hybridity to new conceptual heights. “Christ, Buddha and the Jigsaw,” curated by Phil Zheng Cai, partner at Eli Klein Gallery, and Richard Vine, former managing editor of Art in America, is both exuberant and meditative, uniting nearly 50 post-pandemic works that fuse religious iconography, folk traditions and Pop media.

Christ, Buddha, the Statue of Liberty and eyeballs orbit one another across paintings and sculptures, surrounded by fragments of Đông Hồ, Kim Hoàng and Hàng Trống woodblock motifs. These images, cut into puzzle-like grids and digitally reprinted as multiples, form a kaleidoscopic cosmology of belief and reproduction. The result is an art of transformation—of faith into image, of originality into iteration—reflecting how, in the digital age, even divinity circulates as content.

Installed across two floors, the exhibition guides viewers through a deliberate ascension: the first floor’s dense, image-saturated field of “multiples” gives way upstairs to the “originals.” In Buddha-God in the Mind of Freedom No. 0 (2020), a monumental Buddha head emerges from a dense field of gold-and-black checkerboard squares, its tranquil expression repeatedly disrupted by deliberate gaps that resemble digital glitches. Beneath the Buddha’s surface, faint yet unmistakable, an image of Jesus appears. This subtle merging of two central religious figures destabilizes the notion of singular devotion, suggesting a shared spiritual architecture beneath seemingly disparate traditions. Surrounding the central face, Tâm overlays luxuriant blossoms, birds and serpentine forms drawn from Đông Hồ and Hàng Trống folk imagery, creating a cascading frame of vivid blues and reds. These organic motifs appear to bloom over the Buddha’s visage even as the grid threatens to dismantle it. The work holds a productive tension between serenity and rupture, proposing enlightenment not as a fixed ideal but as an image repeatedly tested by history, hybridity and the fragmentation of faith in the digital age.

In Tâm’s cosmology, faith doesn’t disappear but rather mutates. By allowing Buddha and Christ to coexist with pop icons and digital glitches, he reframes salvation itself as an act of composition, one puzzle piece at a time.