KVT – Dolled up in Yet Kieu
The artist has a pretty nice self portrait with his decapitated head enshrouded…ready for the garbage tip? From the butcher shop? It’s graphic and gruesome and telling! Lots of suggested symbolism.
There are several covered dolls ….western featured dolls and my surmising takes me to a very recent past again- and to most Hanoian toy shops present- where all of the dolls for sale seem to have western faces….Now I mean! What sort of subliminal inferiority message is still being delivered to Vietnamese children ? (I guess it’s a bit like some Catholic churches in Vietnam that tend to present Jesus and his saints as Western visaged)
Now I could keep on surmising till the cows come home from pasture but I’ll leave that to your imaginations as well…which is what the artist is hoping the viewer will do and much more so with the show’s piece de resistance, the large love doll….also Western featured…and its real purpose hidden from real meaning by a ridiculously transparent wrapping…. A bit like so much of the universal commercial political PR spin that is chucked our way with the belief that we are as dumb as those dolls and just accept the BS, or like the sex doll, lay back, stare unseeingly into space and yell silent obcenities at the violations forced upon us
In the center of the gallery is a lovely installation of those shrouded toys (minus the big one)seemingly wearing clothing from pertinent historical times, and metaphorically umbilically connected by technology …and all enclosed in a boxing ring….Great stuff!
And, now, as usual, my apologies to the artist if I’ve got it all wrong or mixed up….I do get carried away an awful lot!
| Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below. |
