Exhibition “It’s All the Same Everywhere”

Opening: Tue 01 Nov, 5.30 pm
Exhibition: 02 – 05 Nov 2011
Vietnam Fine Arts Museum

From the artist:

You are invited to the solo exhibition “It’s all the same everywhere”  of artist Hoang Duy Vang. According to Natalia Kraevskaia “The title of the exhibition refers to the artist’s concern about the reality surrounding him.  For Hoang Duy Vang ‘the same’ doesn’t mean staying same in the stream of time, it’s about the universal comprehensive and everlasting process of change, transformation and metamorphosis in our life”.

Read more about critique by Natalia Kraevskaia about the exhibition below:

“Hoang Duy Vang’s new series of work is very different. His bright colored canvases remind us of the chaotic world of Jackson Pollocks’ energetic paintings which had been called “action paintings” or “gesture paintings.” Like the great American master, Vang puts an emphasis on the dynamics created by the festival of lines, strong brush strokes and vivid chromatic spectrum. Abandoning the traditional concept of the composition and of central motif, the young artist plays with chaotic lines and unfinished shapes in order to convey the fluidity and changeability of reality and to transfer his most personal feelings directly to the canvas. The viewer gets the impression that the visual layers in Vang’s paintings overlap as he or she tries to find the recognizable shapes. Sometimes one can succeed in this laborious search and recognize in the superimposed forms the outlines of a person’s face. Examples include “Wedding Day” or “Heaven in the Street;” there are human silhouettes in “Family,” “Kiss” or “Adam and Eve,” and even animal horns in “Human Beings and Animals” and “Buffalo Fighting Festival.” Meanwhile we shouldn’t forget about the relative meaning of the titles in Hoang’s works: the artist articulates his own suggestions and evocation, but the spontaneous artistic mess, high level of abstraction and turbulence of the forms give room to our own interpretation.

Both the abstract landscapes and expressionistic scenes in this series feature the dramatic movement of life and reflect the artist’s improvised forceful gesture. The element of dynamism, frantic spontaneity and extremely strong application of paint in Abstract Expressionism was explained by the critic Harold Rosenberg, who invented the term “action painting” in 1952, in this quote: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” For Hoang Duy Vang both aspects are important: on the one hand he is an impulsive “actor” who shares his emotions with others, on the other – he says that the relation of artist to society, of artist to public, of artist and artwork are also at the center of his reflections.

These two approaches overlap one another and result in an impressive number of paintings where the artist simultaneously aspires to display his subjective experience employing dynamic gestural marks and elicits emotional reactions from the public using contrasting radiant colors. The paintings in the exhibition are not only connected to each other by their visual vocabulary, they also speak to the exhibited art objects/sculptures which share the similar vivid coloration and, through their obvious yet formal symbolism (like the work “Me”, 2011) define the personality of the artist himself. ”