KVT on “Oh! City!”

Well Studio Tho – you’ve done it again! Another exhibition that’s worth raving about!

Some art viewers have had the sense to follow young artist Đỗ Tuấn Anh since his selection to be one of Vietnam’s representatives in the 2004 ASEAN Art award sponsored by international cigarette firm, Phillip Morris. The public anti-smoking protests that hounded the sponsors throughout that year’s award’s progress sort of fitted well with Do Tuan Anh’s very large and dark monochromatic canvas, Evasion of Death, about the manipulation of the urban poor by the international economic war lords and their local minions. The work, despite its dread theme of drug dependency and corporate drug dealing, was chosen as one of four finalists and won $5000.

A lot of the 30-year-old artist’s work since has highlighted the struggle of daily life of the urban poor and their powerlessness on an industrialized treadmill that uses them and spits them out when it has no more need of them. It’s a theme that has been used by literary and artistic humanists and reformers since the Industrial Revolution led to the growth of industrial cities and their need for factory fodder.

Đỗ Tuấn Anh uses paint lusciously and his figurative, caricature-like canvases bring to mind and sit easily with those 1990 Filipino artists who were protesting very powerfully against a corrupt and immoral society that seemed to have little regard for the huddled masses (Sanggawa, Samson, Coquilla, Gonzales and Manalo were amongst those feted at international biennales) and George Gittoes’ almost unbearable portrayals of the massacres of the innocents in Rwanda.

The four canvases that stand out like beacons at Studio Tho, and if I was curating would have stood alone, are The Magician, The Gate to the City, Deceptive Dream and the Logical Cycle. They successfully and delightfully appropriate a variety of artists and stylesranging from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam through a broad spectrum of prescribed Chinese ideologies and symbolisms, the cinematic formalism of Fritz Lang and early Chaplin, with hat tipping to the 1930’s European surrealists… and it goes on beautifully, cleverly and engagingly… (If you were an art historian with a class of bright young things you could have a creative couple of hours teasing out the threads and setting an absorbing assignment). But at the end of it all you are left, as the artist intended, with a sense of despair.

The exhibition’s title work, Oh City, is a crowded affair with its appropriated use of pasted on cut out magazine photos. It’s very good but it has a dated feel that almost detracts from the very 2009ish immediacy that the big pieces in the main gallery possess. For me, the artist hasn’t yet come to terms with the difficult use of text in art and I didn’t much like Different Moods.

The loaded walls in the lovely ante room with its natural light flooding in during the day are a bit too crowded. Perhaps all it needed were the four really good and simple circular canvases of lust, luck and greed and manipulated desire. Mind you the ink drawings are also engrossing but paint wins out in the overall display.

It’s a timely exhibition and has an aura of brilliance about it. It’s as if Đỗ Tuấn Anh has stepped into a pair of mature shoes and I think that he could become one of Vietnam’s best artistic critical commentators.

The pieces I’ve highlighted are amongst the most exciting new Vietnamese paintings I’ve seen this year and are very collectable. I wish I had a wall big enough for The Magician or Deceptive Dream.

One again, congratulations Studio Tho.