KVT – L’Espace Bejewlled and Gleaming

L’ESPACE BEJEWELLED and GLEAMING

L’Espace looks exotic at present and will do so for a month with Vuong Van Thao’s 47 living fossils resplendent on their pedestals like golden gems. The large acrylic blocks, lit from below and cracked and fissured, resemble precious blocks of golden sapphire, rich amber, and deep honeyed heliodor.
When you look into the slabs you see perfectly preserved village gates, the traditional arched and decorated gateways that mark the entrance to Vietnamese lowland villages. At first you may think that they are identical replicas and it’s with awe that you realize each is entirely different and exact in scale to its full size relative.

Thao has spent four years searching out and making models of the gateways to villages that are being swallowed by Hanoi’s inexorable urban spread. When the model is made and painted it is encased in a block of liquid resin that has an impurity added that makes it develop deep cracks as it solidifies.

Thao started on his fossil making journey way back in 2005 when he saw that the old houses in Hanoi’s old quarter were disappearing and changing at an alarming rate. First he wanted to make a statement and preserve a particular, full size house in a block of ice. This being impractical he decided to preserve, in an acrylic compound, a model of one house from each street. After a lot of trial and error and encouragement from a lot of colleagues, he had the models completed and encased. For each street he fossilized one of its poles that proudly holds aloft a loudspeaker, and added the street’s name. The 64 fossils were exhibited at L’Espace in 2007 to great acclaim.

They drew so much critical attention to themselves that Thao was nominated as one of the ten best artists in the Asia/Pacific region for a particular body of work.

He and the fossils flew off to Singapore, were displayed to more acclaim, and the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) decided to purchase the lot for its extensive collection of the best contemporary art in Southeast Asia.

In 2010 SAM gave the fossil collection its own gallery for a few months and when I saw them there in shining glory, the museum attendants said that it was by far the most popular exhibit in the whole place.

Thao didn’t sit on his laurels and apart from working on the Village Gate series has fossilized every span of the Long Bien Bridge, has a few pagodas and temples permanently preserved in amber cubes. As a side show with his gates at L’Espace, Thao has a row of fabulously fossilized hoe heads that are symbolic of an age old agricultural way of life that is being covered over in the city’s concrete sprawl.

The cube of the little temple in the middle of Hoan Kiem Lake receives a lot of attention.

I keep saying fossils when I should correctly say living fossils! Thao’s fossils are relics of Hanoi’s present in danger of extinction – and most are still extant even if, in the case of the gates, being overawed by cement, steel and rampant commerce…and probably, in some cases, in fear of demolition because cars can’t fit through them.

Thao is artist, archaeologist, historian, archivist and activist….a very potent mix.

To say that the present exhibition is beautiful is to belittle it. It is a jewel-like wonder and should be wondered over by everyone who cares about beauty in art; about the city’s disappearing heritage; about what really good artists are capable of producing.

As if to make sure that street loudspeakers don’t become extinct but, rather, sprout anew, the Peoples’ Committee around where I live decided to put some brand new ones on local street poles. Imagine our joy at 6 am on Saturday morning to wake up to wartime-type songs booming down our alley. A friend who had one directly level with, and two meters from, her open window fell out of bed with the excitement of it all. She rushed onto her balcony and saw the neighborhood all dancing around and singing and listening agape to the election announcements that interspersed the well known songs.