KVT – Blinded by the Light

KVT drops into L’Espace

to catch City of Lights, the opening exhibition of L’Espace’s celebration of the new Year of the Buffalo.

On my way to the Opera house to have a second serving of the sexy beasts making a fabulous feast of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto One, I popped into L’Espace to see Phuong Vu Manh’s installation Hanoi, City of Lights and was immediately sort of lit up with the large floor work of small, empty, capped La Vie bottles each containing a rolled up script of, presumably, Hanoian dwellers’ dreams of a peaceful life. The bottles were spread on a black cloth and, I guess laid out in a configuration of Hanoi from an aerial perspective. Long strings of hundreds of blue fairy lights lit the city -enticingly, temptingly- from below. Above were black and grey gauzy, silken like cloths strung at different heights to approximate clouds, mist, or perhaps evaporated dreams….even smoky prayers to ancestors. Clear glass baubles were hung, seemingly randomly, between the diaphanous veils. Rain? Tears?

Oh, the joy of interpreting an artist’s work for your own gratification!!!

I always love the exercise even if I’m totally wrong.

It’s a lovely part of the total installation that needs to find its own piece of peace in a pitch black place (so seeing how it will stand up to the clear light of day will be worth another visit). Had I been curating I would have thrown out the wall pieces that really detract from the stun of the floor piece. I’d also even wonder if the floor piece could stand alone without the intrusion of the large video (as poetic as it was).

What a brilliant piece it would be if the bottled city of citizen’s lives, aspirations and dreams was tentacled throughout the whole floor space, becoming a huge, pulsating  amoeba which is a bit like Hanoi is to me… sometimes exciting, often cruel,  a haven of unrequited dreams for so many immigrants, seldom a haven of peace unless it is experienced within the mind.