KVT – A Nice Little Gallery Opens its Doors

KVT goes just above the leafy café courtyard at Hanoi Cinemateque and finds Cuci

Vo Quynh Hoa has been instrumental in renovating a space in the old Hotel Des Arts at 22a Hai Ba Trung and a very much needed small white cube has been added to Hanoi’s art spaces. It’s a cool, minimalist room with a polished concrete floor. It’s named Cuci in honor of the owners’ small child.

It’s in an enviable position and if its shows are well chosen, well curated, it could be a boon to the underbelly of up and coming artists who have no established art spaces to show their work. The owners say that their aim is to foster young and emerging artists and if they mean what they say we could be in for a few nice exhibitions. Solo and grouped.

Time will tell!

The other new gallery in town, Nha San Studio, is focused on the real avant garde and cutting edge and if Cuci lights its own path it should also be able to circumnavigate Manzi which has an intellectually leaning mandate. Of course it will have to make itself somehow different to the other commercial galleries around Trang Tien.

Cuci has started off its life story with a collective show by seven artists who were some of the eight finalists in the 2010 Talent Prize for young artists sponsored by the wonderful Danes. The artists had to present a body of work to by judged by an experienced jury of three. To have been chosen as a finalist from young artists from all over Vietnam made these seven a cut above the ordinary. So it was an interesting exercise on Cuci’s part to see which artists had progressed in the three and a half years since that decisive final that was won by:

Pham Van Thu (as he looked back then)

…..whose transvestites/transexuals, I said at the time, inhabited the gothic interiors of his very dramatic and whose appealing works were confronting. However, even more confronting were the images the viewer sees of him/her self in the portraits’ cunning mirror frames. Wonderful stuff!

And about which jury member Natasha Kraevskaia said: “Pham Tuan Tu uses a reduced color palette. With his grays, grays-brownish and dim-yellows he creates an almost medieval ornamental background for his highly emotional and intimate plots. This restrained background doesn’t distract from the main very expressive personae. The viewer can see the same face, but we can’t say that it’s a recurring image. In every work it expresses different feelings: from relaxation and dreams to fears and phobia. Exploring the theme of homosexuality and transsexuality, the artist uncovers the complex inner world of the person”.

One of his winning pieces is here:

And two of his later works are on show at Cuci….both delightfully brazen and, like most of Tu’s work since 2010, very collectable

Another 2010 exhibitor who stirred up my senses back then was Nguyen Xuan Hoang with his delightful monochromatic interiors with chairs, done in a semi geometric abstractionist manner.

Four small works at Cuci carry on with this theme with a figurative leaning. The naturalistic female nude in juxtaposition was my least favorite (ps: the viewer perusing the instalation is not the artist)

‘A wall full of fashionista females that are seemingly morphing into manga trance zombies are almost too awful to contemplate as a societal reality. These almost overly decorated figures by Nguyen The Hung make beautiful but scary statements’ was what I wrote in 2010 and one is exampled below

As you can see there’s an advancement from these to those below which, though decorative, are very popular

My 2010 comment plus one of Dao Anh Viet’s compelling entries: I thought that the Long Bien Bridge had been done to death in the past couple of years but Dao Anh Viet has re-invented the span and outshone a lot of other bridge artists and photographers whose work I’ve seen. His long, thin panels are simply wonderful to behold. Joyful as well as thoughtful!

His two large landscapes at Cuci are a return to the traditional and perhaps reference his training in stage art design

Luong Van Trung made a big splash last year with a solo show at Nguyen Gallery that I thought was really good and if you click here you’ll get a feast of just how good the artist can be.

His 2010 entries, as exampled below, were as impressive and about which I said: the eventful motorbike journeys home by Luong Van Trung are full of wooshing movement and wonderful comment. If they are comments on journeys through an increasingly industrial and impersonal urban landscape, as they probably are, then they start to redefine that social comment genre. The central ‘hotspot’ canvas is quite sensational.

Luong Trung’s piece in Cuci seems much more under developed than those of his I see in commercial galleries.

In 2010 I said that Le Tran Anh Tuan’s painted, colored and collaged works on Do paper were intriguing and worth a long investigation and meditation. Now the artist’s butterfly/ moth oils on canvas are explosive statements about female sexuality and have even more explosive intimations of exploitation and abuse. An artist definitely worth a solo run and who already has an impressive bio.

I was somehow drawn into the black, text canvasses of Nguyen Hong Phuong in 2010. They still have some dramatic kicks about them and their graffitti asks to be read and interpreted.

However, one piece of Phuong’s more recent works that really grabbed me was this cabinet at a delightful exhibition at Ngo Quyen a couple of years ago when a group of young, artistic turks figuratively mooned some of the overly wealthy people in the city..It was a show to remember and I was surprised that it wasn’t curtailed and the provocative ones given an official dressing down.

So to conclude: GOOD LUCK TO ALL AT CUCI …I hope that you can live up to my expectations of you…..I eagerly await the next show.