Mai Ta
Biography
Mai Ta (b. 1997, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese painter whose practice explores the intersections of memory, emotion, and inner experience. Working primarily with gouache and oilpaint, she creates intimate and psychologically charged paintings that transform personal feelings, fleeting sensations, and remembered experiences into poetic visual worlds.
Mai Ta has developed a highly personal painterly language rooted in introspection and emotional honesty. Painting serves as a space in which inner wounds, secrets, desires, and memories can beacknowledged, examined, and gradually transformed into image. Rather than depicting specific narratives, her paintings emerge from fragments of memory, recurring thoughts, and emotional states that resist clear articulation. Through a nuanced system of symbolic imagery, she allows personal experiences to remain partially veiled, inviting viewers to encounter them through atmosphere, ambiguity, and emotional resonance. Central to her practice is the belief that art provides a protected space of freedom, a place where vulnerability can exist without justification and where contradictions remain unresolved. Beauty and loss, desire and fear, tenderness and melancholy coexist within her works, expanding personal experience into broader reflections onlonging, fragility, and the enduring presence of what refuses to disappear.
Mai Ta lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026
Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York, United States (upcoming)
2025
The heart, River Art Gallery, Taichung, Taiwan
2023
Amygdala, Ojiri Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2021
Blue girl, Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York, United States
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026
Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China (upcoming)
Vietnam Art Collection (VAC), Hanoi, Vietnam (upcoming)
Color to Quiet, Galerie Urs Meile, Zurich, Switzerland
Anker Protocol 2.0 — A Place of Concealment, Galerie Urs Meile, Zurich, Switzerland
2025
Womb on Fire, Medium Gallery, Saigon, Vietnam
Womb on Fire, Mơ Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam
2024
Two Sides of the Same Coin, Taikang Art Museum, Beijing, China
2023
The Feast, River Art Gallery, Taichung, Taiwan
The Midnight Hour, The Hole NYC, New York, United States
2022
Wonder Women, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, United States
Wonder Women, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York, United States
2021
London is Burning, Ojiri Gallery, London, United Kingdom
WoP, Avant Arte x Woaw Gallery, Woaw Gallery, Hongkong
2020
Memoirs, Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York, United States
Somebody, Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco, United States
2018
Perceptual Coding, SVA Chelsea Gallery, New York, United States
The Haves and Have-nots, SVA Chelsea Gallery, New York, United States