Laughing and Reflecting at Goethe

At Goethe on Sunday afternoon the gallery resounded with muffled giggles, sniggers of appreciation, roars of belly laughter and the occasional “Oi gioi oi!”

70 original and published cartoons/caricatures by Ly Truc Dung celebrate a very pertinent and decidedly humorous retrospective of his work over the past four decades to the present. Some have an international theme but most thrust their arrows of satire and irony at Vietnamese institutions and contemporary issues. All have captions translated into English and apart from a couple requiring knowledge of that famous rural Vietnamese comic character Chi Pheo and his cheeky young wife, Thi No, are universally understood.

Ly Truc Dung was born in 1946, studied architecture in Germany and obviously absorbed that country’s tradition of satirizing political figures and decisions in caricatures and cartoons. Once you see his work you realize that he’d be right at home as a weekly contributor to the pages of the New Yorker magazine.

Two sculptural installations accompany the work and are also very wry and wonderfully funny.

Not to be missed! And especially not to be missed by that band of young artists who are intent on creating similar bow waves.

As I’m not a fan of filling in wetlands for golf courses or pinching farmers’ land for club swingers I found that a few of the cartoons tickled my anti golf funnybone.