Huong Dodinh’s Luminous Visions Illuminate Lyon’s Dreaming Passages
The Vietnamese artist's evocative paintings feature prominently in the 18th Lyon Biennale, where the city's legendary traboules become portals between states of consciousness and collective imagination.
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The 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art unfolds across the architectural splendour of France’s third city, threading through the storied traboules that have long captured the imagination of artists and philosophers alike. These distinctive passageways, which wind through courtyards and slip between buildings with an almost secretive grace, become in this edition something altogether more profound: architectural metaphors for the invisible journeys between different modes of perception, between one dream and another.
Within this conceptual framework, the paintings of Huong Dodinh resonate with particular eloquence. The Vietnamese artist’s work inhabits that luminous space where figuration and abstraction dissolve into one another, where colour becomes a language of emotion and form suggests rather than declares. Her canvases possess a meditative quality, inviting the viewer to pause, to linger, to allow the eye to travel across surfaces that seem to shift between the tangible and the ethereal.
Dodinh’s paintings, which feature prominently amongst the biennale’s selection of works spread across several emblematic venues, engage directly with the exhibition’s central proposition: that art can facilitate passage, can transport us from one collective consciousness to another. Her approach to painting involves a sophisticated dialogue between structure and spontaneity, between intentionality and reverie, creating works that feel both carefully considered and intuitively arrived at.
The exhibition itself is a sweeping contemporary survey, curated to activate Lyon’s architectural patrimony in new and unexpected ways. By positioning artworks throughout the city’s most significant cultural spaces, the biennale transforms the entire urban landscape into a gallery without walls, a museum of moving consciousness where every corner offers potential revelation.
For those drawn to contemporary painting that speaks to the ineffable, that trusts in the power of colour and composition to evoke emotional and intellectual complexity, Huong Dodinh’s presence within this prestigious platform represents a significant moment. Her work sits comfortably amongst the ambitious artistic conversations that define the contemporary moment, conversations about perception, about how we navigate the world, about the dreams we hold collectively and the passages we must traverse to reach them.
The exhibition runs through December 13, 2026, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon and across other significant sites throughout the city, offering an extended opportunity to engage with this ambitious artistic vision.
Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).
