KVT – Terracotta Sculpture Exhibition by Nguyen Tuan

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DIALOGUES WITH SOME WARM AND DREAMING BUDDHAS

There’s a really good sculpture cum ceramic cum installation exhibition in town. It’s only on for 5 days and that means there’s only three days left to get to the Fine Arts Museum, and really enjoy being in the company of some wonderfully warm Buddhas.

No, it’s not an exhibition for only the excessively spiritually inclined because the most excessively secularist and also the most excessively atheistic (not to mention the excessively agnostic or extistentialistic) amongst us will find that being in the midst of youngish, twenty nine-ish Nguyen Tuan’s sensuously gorgeous Buddha figures is a wonderful experience. I certainly did.

Tuan asked me to write an pre-exhibit bit about his work and initially I focused on the wonderful fecundity of his early work in clay and my first paragraph reads: Eleven years ago, when Nguyen Tuan first thrust his fingers into the moist, red clay at Phu Lang pottery village, he must have felt its sensuous qualities and Tuan’s sculptures are always that. One only has to be reminded of his self portraits, his full lipped or sinuously flowering organic vessels or his dancing figures to know the playful voluptuousness that a very good artist can mould and shape from the most elemental of artistic mediums. When you see Tuan’s sculptures they are always in dialogue with each other, whispering, gossiping, laughing, cajoling, hinting. Put one in isolation from its peers and it seems to be yearning communion across space.

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Tuan’s early work was full of unabashed eros and now in a more mature stage of his artistic development, but no less influenced by Eros, his Buddhas have a human feel about them. Some of you will almost want to stroke and caress many, as if you were a lover and that’s a pretty wonderful thing and I’m sure Buddha would approve. In my pre-bit I stated that: These are not representations of deities on pedestals to be prayed to or meditated in front of but are reflections of ourselves and it is easy to join in the dialogues that flow between, around and through them. It’s the sort of exhibition that you want to be in all by yourself. I’ve done that a couple of times and today when I left I had one of those partial epiphanies that Tuan is exploring in this exhibition (read his artist statement at the Museum to find out more) and as I rode my motor bike slowly down Hai Ba Trung – due to pre-Tet road jams- I really did see that which Tuan calls Buddha and I call my empathetic and sympathetic recognition of individuality and self worth, in the eyes of people I passed. A fleeting epiphany but one that’s still fluttering near as I write a couple of hours later. Not all of Tuan’s Buddha-themed sculptures are on display in this exhibition but when the others are unveiled you’ll be even more amazed at this artist’s ability. He has a long way to go before he reaches his creative peak and if this work is an indication, that peak could be Olympian (if his faith in Eros is still strong) or Himalayan if Buddha’s dream remains intact. How I’d love to have a few of those gorgeous heads smiling in the grass or twining greenery at home. Warmly unmissable!