Collection+ 2025: Thanh Uy, Lưu Chữ and Bưu Hoa
“Collection +” is a new initiative inviting members of the arts community to select works from Dogma’s archives and pair them with their own—engaging with historical materials in fresh ways while considering their relevance today.
Lưu Chữ is an independent graphic design collective based in Hồ Chí Minh City, with a focus on exploring Vietnam graphic design history through documents and applications of typography art. As graphic designers, Lưu Chữ is particularly drawn to propaganda art, not for their messages, but for how those messages are conveyed through style and form. For “Collection +”, the group selected four propaganda posters based on their color palette, composition, iconography, and especially typography.
Back in 2021, Lưu Chữ first visited Dogma’s poster archives for research with the aim to develop a new typeface that would support Vietnamese text well. Referencing the bold condensed letterforms used in mobilization materials and public billboards during the Reform period between 1986 and 2000 in Vietnam, Lưu Chữ launched the first iteration of ‘Chung’ in 2022, and has continued developing it since. In this exhibition, the group showcases photographs, footage, and publications collected throughout Chung’s creation alongside materials from Dogma, bridging present and past artistic productions.
Thanh Uy Art Gallery, Vietnam's first gallery specializing in graphic art, was founded in Hanoi in early 2021. Its vast collection demonstrates the wide variety of graphic art that has developed in Vietnam: folk paintings from craft villages such as Đông Hồ, Hàng Trống, Kim Hoàng, and Sình, alongside propaganda posters, combat sketches, graphic paintings and sculpture. In addition to its permanent collection, the gallery features a print studio and event space, fostering Hanoi's graphic artist community.
Collection and gallery founder–Đức Thanh Uy–finds that both his and Dogma’s collection contains artworks that represent women as key figures during wartime. His selection of combat sketches produced between 1960 and 1972–while the American War in Vietnam was still raging–highlights images of women in different roles that figured prominently in conflict. For Đức, women have become idealized iconography of the war: “The sketches might be modest, but they are archetypal of heroic revolutionary figures in graphic art.”
Bưu Hoa is a virtual archival project documenting Vietnam's lost postage-stamp culture, started in 2017 by Đức Lương (Luongdoo)—a full-time commercial art director and illustrator who spends his free time collecting and documenting stamps. Lương is interested in themes of history, particularly materials produced during the period of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the natural world.
“Collection +” marks Bưu Hoa’s first in-person exhibition since its establishment. The online archive steps out of the digital sphere to present its recent nature-themed stamps alongside Dogma’s vintage stamps produced between 1958 and 1967. The recent stamps captivate Lương primarily for their formal qualities—the use of graphics, colors, and composition—which suggest a continuing artistic lineage in stamp-making. The vintage stamps, for Lương, are iconic in terms of their production context, “I honestly admire how artists at the time created beauty through hardship, which is incredibly touching to me as an illustrator.”
