Exhibitions · 2025
“Light and Shadow”: The Olfactory Exhibition Comes to Hanoi for the First Time on 14 February 2025
- Published
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 1 min
First published in Vietnamese on 19 January 2025. Translated in 2026 and kept to the original.
Since then:
- The exhibition ran from 14 to 20 February 2025 at Tách Spaces, Hanoi, and has now closed; the invitation and the registration link at the end of the article are no longer in use.
This Valentine’s Day 2025, “Letters from 221B Baker Street – Scents of Shadow” — the olfactory exhibition so warmly received by lovers of art and scent in Ho Chi Minh City — will open in Hanoi for the first time, under an entirely new name: “Light and Shadow”. For scent artist Rei Nguyen, the solo exhibition is a special milestone: the first time she has brought a scent exhibition to Hanoi.
Held at Tách Spaces, a venue well known to Hanoi’s many lovers of art events, “Light and Shadow” is an art exhibition and, beyond that, a doorway into a world of feeling and creativity. Each installation has been carefully designed to lead the visitor through its stories and its scents. Inside, one is drawn into a setting at once refined and mysterious, where each note stirs a memory and leads the soul through landscapes of emotion.
Exploring the dialogue between light and darkness
Turning over questions of good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, Rei Nguyen borrows two celebrated characters, Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty, to tell an olfactory story of her own. In a deliberately composed setting of more than 2,000 letters, the story is told through scent, and each letter is a piece of the puzzle, holding the artist’s own reflections on life.
In this solo exhibition, “Light and Shadow”, Rei Nguyen restages a dramatic confrontation between metaphorical figures, and opens a door for visitors to reflect on the fragile line between light and darkness within themselves.
A doorway to creating with scent
R Parfums invites you to “Light and Shadow”: Dates: 14–20 February 2025 (9:00–18:30 daily). Venue: Tách Spaces, 20 Hai Bà Trưng, Tràng Tiền, Hoàn Kiếm, Hanoi. Admission is complimentary.
