KVT – Do Tuan Anh and his Travelling Works of Wonder at...

KVT – Do Tuan Anh and his Travelling Works of Wonder at Manzi

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KVT 2015

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KVT enjoys another of a master painter’s journeys portrayed in an oriental way

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There’s a very excellent art exhibition at Manzi that is worth a visit. It’s new work by Do Tuan Anh . It will probably be recognized as one of this year’s premium solo shows and after digesting the implied steroid loaded message behind the veil you may realize why Tuan Anh has had a love affair with vegetables… but more about that later…

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These new works are on paper with washes of acrylic and ink behind extremely well drawn Tuan Anh motifs – all executed in his inimitable surrealistic style.

A large monochrome quadtych is a turbulent show stopper and is truly breath-taking and worth the trip to Manzi.

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Although the pieces can be purchased individually, it would be $6 000 well spent by a collector or art connoisseur to grab the whole lot.

While I was taking a look at the artworks on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, bathed in Manzied air conditioning and sipping a cold green guava juice, a well informed Singaporean couple were purchasing this one:

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Before I carry on about the work in the exhibition I’ll digress with a brief, historical tribute to the artist…

A couple of years ago Do Tuan Anh and his Vietnamese/European nuclear family of three relocated to a northern European country

PART ONE… a frenzy

Before he left Hanoi, where he had become a very large fish in the local artistic puddle, a group of his European fans hosted Hanoi’s first ever Affordable Art Frenzy at the Hanoi Cooking Center and his small but very colorful, tongue in cheek, vegetarian themed canvasses that were underpinned with Vietnamese folk story motifs sold faster than the Center’s delectable hot cakes.

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Do Tuan Anh 4965r

PART TWO… nostalgia upon departing

A few months earlier he’d been the focus of a solo exhibition at Craig Thomas Gallery in the southern big smoke, and being a big Tuan Anh aficionado I wrote a bit of a biographical piece on the works and Tuan Anh’s motivation behind the large landscape canvasses that were deliberately full of nostalgia with a few soup-spoons of foreboding stirred through.

Many were in the inimitable Tuan Anh style. Heavy paint dragging you kicking and screaming with delight into the confines of the pictures; loads of allegorical, oriental, folksy symbolism and motifs that pushed and pulled your eyes and imaginations into often wildly divergent directions and translations.

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Other nostalgic landscapes emptied themselves into metaphors of longing and even anticipated dread

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PART THREE… further back

Tuan Anh hit the art market in the early two thousands with some thickly painted social comment works that were representative of the protest stuff (often heavily censored) being tentatively put forward by many of the young artists with whom he’d studied and befriended.

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A few years later he grabbed attention with his well fed youngster in very large canvasses outlining pertinent social comments and featuring various vegetable, insectivorous and rural analogies.

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PART FOUR… the present in air conditioned Manzi

Some of Tuan Anh’s works on paper-all in landscape format-are loaded with his folk tale imagery, often reminiscent of Dong Ho prints with a sharp kick in the solar plexus.

Social commentatory still abounds and is sometimes savage in intensity and any European viewers who are conversant with the heavy hitting social satire that abounded in Punch and Judy shows over past centuries will shake their heads in wonder at the analogies in the art work that meets you as you first climb the stairs.

Some other works that are also loaded to a lesser degree with wonderful eye traumatizing imagery are represented below:

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A sinister, throat slitting menace accompanies some of the works:

Do Tuan ANh- Stories Told in oriental way

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There’s a powerful, distinct and awful echo of Goya’s Peninsular War art works that stops you in your tracks:

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While the bewildered tiger image on a brick wall is hauntingly prescient:

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One of my favorite works is rampantly scary and you just know where the defiant cock is going to end up –denuded, trussed up, boiled and on a plate:

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The deceptively peaceful -or isolated- work with its figure awash in a swirl of jade green is Tuan Anh at his new best…

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… and which, to me, is a lovely revisiting of:

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When a large fish from a small pond becomes a very small fish in an extremely big lake and when all of the signposts are in a foreign language and when just about all of the other fish around you are larger and from a culture steeped in historically tinged racial histrionics and colonially colored superiority and where you are one of the few odd fish navigating the muddy shallows, then this work may speak eloquently to you.

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Look forward to Tuan Anh’s next journey… As do lots of young Vietnamese artists who know that each of those journeys is loaded with aspects of tension and experimentation.

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Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below.

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