Vin Gallery proudly presents a solo show by Son Dang that explores the concept of digital-native aesthetics as a profound philosophical response to our algorithm-driven world. Son Dang’s introduces the concept of the "Peripheral node," which became the title of the show, that depicted those creators in the internet who operate from society's margins, embracing momentary affect over permanence. Through his visual explorations of glitches, infinite scrolls, and vibe shifts, Son Dang’s redefines the digital age as fleeting ruptures of intensity that reject purpose and permanence.
Exhibition text by Duo Tuong Linh
To Appear Briefly, To Exist Fully by Do Tuong Linh
Son Dang (b. 2002, Vietnam) is a visual artist living and working between Porto, Portugal, and Hanoi, Vietnam. Navigating between these two cultural and technological ecosystems, his practice emerges from the experience of living across screens, cities, and timelines — a life shaped equally by physical dislocation and digital immersion. Trained at Minerva Art Academy in the Netherlands, Dang belongs to a generation for whom the Internet is not an external space but a total environment: an ecosystem of emotion, attention, and aesthetics.
His statement begins with a simple but radical claim: “The age of the feed has replaced the age of the monument.” For centuries, art aspired to endure — cathedrals, marble statues, oil paintings — each a promise that beauty could resist time. Today, such permanence feels obsolete. The feed, as Dang observes, updates in real time, erasing each image as quickly as it appears. In this condition, meaning no longer accrues through duration but through intensity: through the instant of sensation before disappearance.
Dang’s paintings visualize this shift between endurance and ephemerality. Working with thick impasto, garish chroma, and fragmentary compositions that seem to flicker between resolution and collapse, he transposes the digital aesthetics of compression into the material realm of paint. His images often resemble low-resolution screenshots, corrupted game graphics, or half-rendered landscapes — canvases that appear to buffer, glitch, or pixelate before the viewer’s eyes.
This aesthetic finds deep resonance with Hito Steyerl’s concept of the “poor image.” In her 2009 essay In Defense of the Poor Image, Steyerl defines the poor image as “a copy in motion,” a low-resolution, degraded version of an original artwork that circulates endlessly across the Internet. Poor images, she writes, are “compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as they move between networks of production and exchange.” They lose fidelity but gain velocity; they shed aura but accumulate affect. They embody the contradictions of our visual economy — at once disposable and ubiquitous, invisible and omnipresent.
Son Dang’s paintings bring this condition into material form. He renders the poor image not as a digital file but as a painting that looks compressed, where brushstrokes mimic pixel grids and colors bleed like over-saturated screens. His canvases vibrate with the instability of a corrupted JPEG — as though caught in the moment of digital decay. By translating compression into paint, Dang reveals how the logic of the poor image has infiltrated even the most traditional artistic mediums. The canvas becomes a screen that remembers its failures: every blur, every glitch, every visible mistake becomes a marker of authenticity.
For Steyerl, the poor image is democratic because it escapes control; it resists ownership and elitism. Its value lies not in its resolution but in its distribution, its ability to travel, to connect, to belong to everyone and no one. Dang’s paintings echo this politics of circulation. They evoke the collective memory of a generation raised on torrent sites, streaming platforms, and meme pages — where images are endlessly shared, distorted, and remixed until the original becomes irrelevant. His work thus reimagines painting as a post-digital commons, where the act of degradation becomes an act of renewal.
Thematically, Dang’s practice belongs to what Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (2015), call the “networked condition”: a cultural state in which art is inseparable from the technologies and temporalities that mediate it. In this condition, as Boris Groys has argued, the artwork no longer guarantees immortality but becomes a time-based event, a temporary node in the infinite scroll of visibility. To paint in this age is to accept disappearance as a medium.
This acceptance defines Dang’s idea of the “peripheral node” — the anonymous user, the poster without status, who creates precisely because their work will vanish. In the attention economy, to appear briefly is to exist fully. The peripheral node embodies a kind of liberation through ephemerality, an aesthetic of joyful impermanence that redefines artistic freedom as the right to disappear.
If the Romantic painters of the nineteenth century sought the sublime in storms and ruins, Dang’s generation finds it in the chaos of the feed. His brushstrokes carry the rhythm of scrolling; his compositions loop like broken GIFs. The sublime here is not vastness but overload — not transcendence but saturation. Claire Bishop has noted that contemporary art’s task is to “mediate the sensory overload of digital capitalism.” Dang does so by embracing it: turning irony into sincerity, glitch into gesture, feed into feeling.
Living between Porto and Hanoi, Son Dang occupies both a geographic and aesthetic periphery — between Europe’s art circuits and Southeast Asia’s fast-evolving digital cultures. From this vantage, his paintings do not mourn the loss of permanence; they celebrate the fleeting, the fragile, and the low-resolution. They transform compression into a form of care, and impermanence into a form of presence.
To encounter his work is to experience what Steyerl calls “a visual bond in the age of ephemeral media”: a connection that flickers briefly, brightly, ecstatically — before disappearing into the next scroll.
