KVT offers a visual essay on fossils and bums

Some people in the know may suggest that I shouldn’t be opinion-ing about the Vuong Thao Exhibition at Bookworm Too in Nghi Tam Village but as  I’m a huge fan of the artist  I guess I’ll have to ignore any assertions they may make and have some writing fun!

Thao has had a few small exhibitions in the art spaces of the Bookworm as it has moved around the city when rent increases forced it to bundle up its book collection and move on. When he heard that the bookshop was going to take a risk and open a second branch in Nghi Tam village in a hidden away French Style Villa, he volunteered to celebrate the experiment by offering to have an exhibition there.

Bookworm Too handed over the bookshop display area for display and gave him the entire second floor to change into a one off gallery for a month.

When the exhibition opened on October 12, the contents were as much a delightful surprise to the Bookworm as they were to the public who have been dropping in to query prices. It is an exhibition that is a delightful mini retrospective of Thao’s work since 1998 and introduces a very interesting divergence in his living fossil concept

Thao is one of Hanoi’s more successful artists. A couple of years ago he was selected as one of the South East  Asia region’s top ten artists and was represented in Singapore by his 64 living fossil sculptures of the Old Quarter all of which were subsequently bought by The Singapore Art Museum.

Retrospectively a viewer can see a fossilized piece of the Long Bien bridge…..the rest of which is scattered throughout the world.

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