KVT – Black to Black

KVT takes time to sing the praises of Project Black…yet again

As any regular-or irregular- readers will know I’m a huge fan of ‘Project Black’ in all its guises, excesses, assertions, provocations… and particularly of its latest documentary which screened last Saturday night in the back room at the Cinemateque ….and which made me an even bigger fan.

It was a much more sedate show than usual. Normally the overture is performance art performance…sometimes brilliant and sometimes pretty awful…but whatever the caliber, it usually makes most foreigners in the audience evacuate the venue pretty quickly and thus they miss out on the main event which is a documentary about a particular artist who is ‘working outside the art establishment norm’. This time, to the Westerners’ relief -but to my chagrin- the performance was omitted and the audience stayed put.

On Saturday, too, thanks to a pregnant audience member, there was no cigarette puffing allowed and I managed to enjoy the screening without the usual fear of passive inhalation and watering eyes

Thus a very attentive and appreciative full house watched the best Black documentary produced and filmed thus far. Well directed with English subtitling spot on and sound track just right. Easy to watch. You could say riveting!

Titled ‘ContamiNation’ it was about emerging artist Dang Xuan Hung who hails from Thanh Hoa Province. Hung went to the Hanoi University of Fine Arts after high school and like a lot of graduates found employment in the Graphic Design industry…which can be pretty contaminating to the soul and mind of an artist who has the talent but not the financial backing, to continue life as an artist…and Hung was always one of the top talents in his university class. He progressed on to a successful Interior Design career and then chucked it all in and decided to uncontaminate himself…took up the Zen type philosophical discipline of martial arts , trained his body to healthy condition and decided to take on the contamination that he saw was endangering his nation…pollution of the air and water ….and the pollutions such as poverty that blankets the souls of so many of his fellow citizens and the contaminates like heroin that pollute individuals’ integrity (I hope I’m not too far off the mark with my interpretation)

The film, like all Project Black docos, as it traces the artist’s motivations and lifestyle it makes frequent visual allusions to a piece of work from the series that has been commissioned from the artist by young art entrepreneur Wei from Fon Ya Gallery in Taiwan. At the end of the screening the canvas is carried onto the stage for critical viewing.

This series of Hung’s work is all rippled and swished in black strokes and, as I come from a western background my mind was drawn to the more gargantuan mythical/spiritual works of William Blake as per examples

to the prints about a decaying society by William Hogarth

I couldn’t stop 1930ies anti Nazi protest works of Otto Dix from popping into my mind or the powerful comments on a society gone mad by Francisco Goya

The film was interspersed with effectively jagged images of Hanoi’s garbage collection and disposal problems, waterway pollution, air pollution and the chaotically desperate lives of the city’s laboring and migrant workers, air pollution, and the invidious underground of drug dependency. Probably the best and urgent visuals I’ve seen thus far about Vietnam’s contamiNation ( though is it any worse than a million other burgeoning and bursting urban centers around the globe?)

The scene when we are taken to Hung’s home town, a choking place in the midst of belching cement factories returned my mind to that rather pretty provincial town of Tuyen Quang a few years ago when I hired a bike and took a trip along rural roads that suddenly turned into a nightmarish, alien world where everything-houses, vegetation, vehicles, inhabitants- was brushed deep in grey cement dust vomited from a cement factory. Dust that immediately clogged your lungs and glued your eyes and must have turned into fetid grey ooze come rain. Before the screening Stephen, the Australian director of the documentary, simili-ed his experience amidst the cement villages as being mediaeval and I immediately conjured up scenes from the movie of Umberto Eco’s novel,’ The Name of the Rose’…and it was dismally evocative.

If you’ve read this far you can see that I was very impressed with the documentary and look forward to the next one (the season finishes in October with number 10)

Before I comment on Hung’s artistic ability I’ll wait until I can see his complete series…though one of my favorite artists, the very successful Tuan Anh, who is another Thanh Hoa-an and was a classmate at University, vouches for Hung’s talent and ability and in some small measure Hung’s Black series sometimes nicely references Tuan Anh’s early style.