KVT – More Journeyings around Tuan Anh

KVT and a fulfilling vegetarian course at the Cooking Centre

There’s a traditional woodprint (Dong Ho?) that is all about jealousy and retribution. A long suffering wife learns of yet another of her husband’s infidelities with other (or another) woman and decides to take a stand. When he comes home, all cock of the coop, she is ready and chases him around the village with a large pair of scissors determined to snip off  all, or the most offensively offending stem, of his invasively persuasive private parts.

Artist Tuan Anh revisits this print in one of his small paintings on exhibition at the Hanoi Cooking Centre restaurant….but the husband, perilously close to castration, is depicted as a cob of personified corn.

This is one of the many scenes transcribed from traditional sources that Tuan Anh takes you on a journey through. They are frozen moments in particular stories…or frozen moments in stories that have reverberated through Tuan Anh’s fertile and fecund imagination – or have been born from that imagination.

All of these particular little oils on canvas have as one of their characters a vegetable or fruit.

As I’m not all that intimate with the tales or prints that the artist has used as a springboard for some of his imaginations I can’t elaborate further but would really like a story telling session by him. I’m pretty sure that lots would reek of earthiness and ribaldry.

Some of my particular favorites are:

The woman whom I like to think is off to have a sensual episode with a lime..or better still, a guava, which in Tieng Viet can be breathed like a low and sensual moan.

A man collecting watermelon juice…as he would the blood of a chicken, or cow after slaughter

The young man conversing with a lascivious orange. This is one case where I’d like to be able to decode the symbolisms that float around.

The mandarin taking his pet pumpkin for a walk on a lead

The emotive slaughter of a leek

Wrestling with a fighting cock ginseng before it can escape to freedom and strip the desperate male of his potency

Keeping the dreaded durian at bay

And lots of others as you can see in some of the cunningly arrange tableaux devised around the wall by the artist/curator.

One of Tuan Anh’s distinctive devices is the trip into the surreal and in the previous images this is often delightfully seen in those inscrutable eyes that add a touch of otherworldliness and seem to be staring at you, as you lean in to view the small canvasses, like disembodied philosophers perhaps suggesting, ‘there’s much more to all this than meets the casual eye (s)!’

Apart from the scenes that revel in belly laughs, oblique smiles, and whimsy are those that do away with humans and pose vegetables and fruit that morph into known or fanciful animal in surreal landscapes ….as seen in one of my favorites of a come hither star fruit…. and in the arrangement of them in landscapes  of blue and green mystery. The ferocious dau rieng featured in the middle is a delightful foil

The myriad small, illustrative canvasses have  been a smash hit with buyers and this could well be to do with price as well as visual appeal. They are cunningly framed in box frames and this allows them to be displayed as paintings or as objects on a table etc.

For Tuan Anh – who has recently had a critically applauded exhibition of a series of his large canvasses of his ‘Far Away’ series in TP Ho Chi Minh and has been in private international collections since his outstanding solo debut at the now, and sadly defunct Studio Tho in 2008 – the decision to undertake this new, light hearted venture, could have caused a few moments of indecision as to whether his hard won reputation may be compromised on the altar of commercialism.

But in difficult times, like now, when the market for Vietnamese art is lulling in the doldrums, its vital that the brightest and best talents stay afloat and able to continue with the work that keeps their name and reputations up in lights….and this means them having financial resources or backing. And although some artists maybe hinting that they’d never sell their souls thus , others, feeling the pinch, are wondering about the little excursions they could think up to get in on the quick selling act.

For Tuan Anh the veggie excursion is probably a one off as he counts the dongs  and dollars and decides on his next serious adventure in oils. These light hearted canvasses plus the few  that didn’t grab me too tightly (those on glass in light boxes -which were also snatched up by eager purchasers) are connected to his previously exhibited series in their use of traditional symbolism and traditional tales and characters and, while they may not enhance his earlier work, they hardly detract from it. They are probably only a momentary  digression from the thrust of his recentSaigonexhibition which had him pushing towards a minimalism that was questing and leaving behind previous well loaded figurative pathways.

On the other hand, the gratification that comes from such a successful exhibition as this one at HCC could be very seductive …and to a lot of artists it certainly would be.

An overseas bachelor artist acquaintance, now in his early sixties, left the hard stuff behind when he was falling out of fashion about thirty years ago and, on a whim, mounted postcard size watercolors of chooks and roosters. They sold too well in  a prominent  gallery and thus he was totally seduced. When poultry went out of favor he did very small acrylics of overweight ladies on local beaches and they went through the roof. He’s still at it and now he has chucked the gallery system to one side and has a couple of exhibitions at home and makes more than enough to live very comfortably on and take a trip overseas now and then. When he announces a new show it’s a packed affair as his fans jostle for a new piece (few priced over $500 last year with an occasional bit of dross at under $100) and there’s always a few notable collectors on hand who quickly sort out the wheat from the chaff and grab up those ones that are far above the ordinary and liable to accrue in price using the artist’s long ago, critically acclaimed reputation.

Although the derision thrown his way by jealous colleagues occasionally smarts, he is one of the very few around who lives, and lives quite well, thank you, from the proceeds of his art. As he gets older and greyer the ideal of becoming an artist with something to say grows greyer and mistier inside his artistic innards and he’s more than content to paint his canvas covered art boards as he sits on his verandah overlooking the ocean …..afterwards sharing a nightly bottle of very good wine with his friends.

It’s good friends of Tuan Anh who, as I hear it, gave him the idea, the free art space, the  creative, inventive and nicely assertive marketing, and low commissions to make a body of work around a potentially marketable theme. And it worked admirably. A people loaded opening. Good wine and food. Great music in the courtyard to lose your inhibitions to and gyrate and shimmy and  sensuously undulate with. Fans of whimsy and veggies and traditional malarkey able to get a bargain, and with a connoisseur or three grabbing at the occasional glowing gem

Then there were the pieces de resistance which I definitely couldn’t resist….the absolute stars of the show.

Hovering above the crowd on opening night (and for a month over diners in the HCC restaurant) are sculptures that made me utter more than a few loud wows and more under my breath. A flock of winged gentlemen (some call them angels but it’s hard to think of many men as heavenly creatures ) carved from the wood of a jackfruit tree-or some such fruitsome branch. Although these superb creatures, brightly painted in various manly clothes, were not part of the initial veggie series, the fact that they are carved out of the wood of a tree that bears delicious, aromatic, edible fruit, allows them their place as interested observers..as they soar, float and occasionally appear to offer benediction to the fun and frolic below them.

But wouldn’t you know it! A couple of those blasted connoisseurs beat me to it and claimed two of the most captivating winged chappies

I’d have liked the lot of them….too delicious for words…which should therefore end now but I can’t resist a post script about the absurdist, surreal dream I had the other night, worthy of a scene in a play by Ionesco, which, if it did become a tantalizing reality what a delectable selection of canapés we’d have to chose from on our gastronomic travels around Hanoi. Its fabulist scenario seemed to populate itself with some of my  favorite artists that I’d come into contact with or written about last week. So in an absurdist, or better still Marinetti’s Cuisina type way, imagine:

Pham Huy Thong’s naked little putti figures from his brilliant Au Co children’s series cavorting through various pastas at Angelina’s; or Ha Manh Thanh’s supercilious brides and grooms going through the delectable menu at Vertical; or Marita Nurmi transposing her fabulous roses on tin and steel to offerings at Bobby Chin; The Son revisiting his silk paintings of buildings under construction but now with the billowing, blousy, striped plastic sheeting lifting to reveal ice cream extravaganzas at Fannies; Ly Tran Quynh Giang’s owl eyed masterpieces miniatured down with them viewing delicate and preciously arranged sushi at Hanoi’s best Japanese restaurant ;  Nguyen Manh Hung’s very surreal and totally delightful war planes painted swooping over Tay Ho towards Don’s Bistro trailing behind cartloads of oysters from far away places; Vuong Tao arranging small and delicate amber fossil sculptures with age old traditional treats from Dinh Lanh inside ; Nguyen Tran Cuong adding sparkling champagnes and deep ruby wines instead of lit lamps to his seductive reclining nudes on paper at all Red Apron outlets; the list of possibilities is as amusing and adventurous as Tuan Anh’s winged manikins.

PSS: with apologies to any names I have inadvertently used in vain