KVT – Horses and Landscapes
KVT in mountain mood
Doan Xuan Tang has a fairly uneven exhibition at The Viet Art Center in Yiet Kieu. Its theme is the northern mountain minority farmers and the landscapes they live in. Though I wasn’t viscerally or visually grabbed by most of the canvasses, I did find a couple of gems.
What got me going along in the first place was the above image on the invitation. It’s an exhausted horse that was a nice take on ‘Novecento’…a taxedermic horse suspended from a ceiling by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
If you’ve ever spent a lot of time in out of the way mountain places, this nicely executed canvas of an exhausted mountain pony after a hard day’s work will certainly touch you, as will this one of an eviscerated pony after its ‘use by’ date which could be very cunningly appropriated from the carcass work of Chaim Soutine and, as I see it, there’s nothing wrong with appropriation in art by young artists.
Two of Tang’s fluid mountain landscapes in very thickly applied paint are about the best things on offer and are certainly evocative to travelers who have an eye for Vietnamese mountain landscapes. I was certainly taken back to many of my favorite vistas.
The other work I liked was one of mountain women having a mid-day break. The paint here is nicely patchy with the canvas showing through in a manner that accentuates the poverty of the people shown.
Closes on the 22nd.
| 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. |
