Quang San Art Museum is the first private art museum in Ho Chi Minh City dedicated exclusively to Vietnamese fine arts. With a growing collection of over 1,600 historically and culturally significant works, the museum offers a rare lens into the evolution of Vietnam’s artistic identity – from the beginning days of Indochine aesthetics to the dawn of contemporary expression.
M — N Associates, based in Ho Chi Minh City too, created the new identity of the museum in 2025. Their concept, “Layers of Contemplation”, draws inspiration from the structure of a painting itself – where canvas, frame, and gesture form a unified whole. For the purpose of the identity, they created a custom typeface, MN QSAM, a sans serif inspired by the museum’s signature architecture – where sharp structure meets quiet elegance. It features an extended set of alternates for its capital, showing interrupted strokes remembering of a painter brush strokes.
On top of their custom font, the identity features the type system NaN Serf Sans (primarily) and NaN Serf (more sporadically). The humanistic sans NaN Serf Sans, with its open counters and high legibility complements MN QSAM perfectly for all running texts, small signs, the website UI… This project shows M — N Associates coming back once more to NaN for fonts with a good support for the Vietnamese language out of the box.
