KVT – En Plein Air in Van Mieu
KVT takes a breath of the great outdoors
There’s an unusual exhibition of paintings by five young artists at the Nguyen Art Gallery in Van Mieu. Unusual because it’s a showing of smallish landscapes and still lifes painted representationally. It’s a clever concept as the group have probably researched the present buyers market and may have come to a conclusion that work ostensibly done in plein air, on fairly small canvasses with a few still lifes thrown in, may seduce the customer who wants the safe and known.
Not that its chocolate box or calendar type stuff and a lot is pretty nice work
The group describes itself as a collection of mobile artists who like to paint in oils en plain air…in the great outdoors and it’s the plein air landscapes that work much better, for me, than the still life vases of flowers.
Now I hope I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong about all of the following but here goes: If the group is truly painting on site without reference to photographs then they are following a hundred- plus a bit more- year old tradition that could only start when oil paints became fluid enough and portable enough to use without tedious mixing and preparing in studio situations. Just about all western countries have had their notable plein air groups or movements with the most famous being theBarbizons, and the Impressionists inFrance. Many artists still assiduously follow the style of painting that has to be done fairly quickly to capture the particular light of a particular time of day….sans reference to the dreaded photographic image.
It will be a popular show if the crowded opening is anything to go by and will suit those buyers who are after small, impressionistic pieces of art. There’s a some really nice bits on the walls (it’s also a nicely hung show with no overcrowding so that all of the pieces can breathe freely). The framing enhances the work and adds a classical touch to it…but not enough to make it twee.
If there’s been some appropriation of ideas from famous local and the old Gallics then that’s to be expected of pretty good young artists who are on the make.
Of all I liked the landscapes by Duy Hoa in the second floor gallery the most. Not all of them sang out loud but those that did are worth a second and third look
Dang Hiep’s landscapes on the ground floor are definitely worth a closer viewing too. Lots of lovely atmospheric feeling and perhaps you’ll recognize the one that can be glimpsed as you cross the Red River via the Long Bien Bridge…on the way to Gia Lam
Trinh Lien had two paintings that I enjoyed though I daresay a lot of viewers would have preferred an emotively colored couple that left me a trifle cold.
Le Thuy’s landscapes had a real plein air feel to them and I chose:
Duy Tung’s work had a lot of admirers and with some I really enjoyed that autumny grey and misty mua xuan atmosphere that lay upon them (the paintings mostly but occasionally on the admirers who had wandered in from the cold, moist evening air)
Now this type of show isn’t usually my cup of tea, even a nice Earl Grey with lemon, but after a few sips of ‘The Colors of Nature’ I felt quite refreshed….perhaps it was the audacity of it all…. and given exposure to the right audience, a lot of these works would sell like cupcakes at a school bazaar.
The Nguyen Gallery and The art Talk Café (which I featured in my last opinion piece) have all the physical possibilities of becoming major art spaces for interesting, even experimental Hanoian art. Wouldn’t it be exciting if they grabbed the bit between their teeth and ran with it!? Both have a choice of interior spaces that could be used in so many ways…my febrile mind salivates just by thinking about the menus they could provide. If only their curators had been at Tadioto’s art talk on Sunday night!
All images courtesy of the Nguyen Gallery
| 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. |
I think it’s worth pointing out Dang Hiep’s visual reference to what may have been Van Gogh’s last painting, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatfield_with_Crows
…….and as KVT commented in the middle of the article…..is there anything wrong with that!
1) The name of the group reminds me the name of another group known in art history as The Itinerants – a group of Russian realist artists who in protest at academic restrictions left the Art Academy in 1863 and formed an artists’ cooperative in 1870. Though their main idea was that art should attribute a social and moral responsibility and portray scenes of injustice, poverty and criticize autocratic government, their most popular genre was landscape, and in fact mainly they used plein air technique.
Following the works of Mobile artists group which they displayed on FB and their exchange of related comments, I can see the obvious influence of The Itinerants ideas to this group of young Vietnamese artists.
Interesting parallel but risky competition with Levitan…..
2) My friend noticed that there are almost no signs of Vietnameseness in the landscapes…. I looked again and again and only on some landscapes found the banana leaves like the most obvious sign. But the whole impression is that this is European nature….. for me, very much like landscapes of middle Russia…..
Ha!
Natalia,
You are spot on — we had the same conversation @ home on the parallels of the works in this exhibition with The Itinerants / Peredvizhniki.
Also, you are absolutely spot on in regard to the the analysis of the works.
…and…since day one in VN, I was wandering where is the powerful landscape of Vietnam in the visual arts of this country…
which. to my mind and my very narrow knowledge of this, only the Artist Y gave a definitive, though allegorical answer in his work…
+ just to add another opinion in support to the observations of your friend too, as much as to yours…
In response to Ms Parr, I don’t think that anything in my original comment suggests that there is something ‘wrong’ with a painter including a visual reference to another, better-known, painting. However, it may add to the interest of the piece if the viewer is aware of such a contextual reference, as plainly the painter’s work has at some point been informed by looking at someone else’s picture and, I assume, he wishes us to juxtapose the two paintings in some way, whether for contrast or comparison.
ps… Mentioning Levtan as a challenge …how abowt the dept of Shishkin…becoming a national icon…. ?
Hello you two who know the Russian plain air schools.so well. Is the Russian influence still perhaps a long lasting influence from Vietnamese artists who went to Russia to study from the middle of the last century?
Unfortunately my own art history studies at university completely avoided any reference to the Russian artists that you mention. These studies were during the cold war era and I was in the US
It is also difficult to resource information about them from my collection of art history books.
Ilza, For me this Vietnamese group is far from the mood of Shishkin’s works, he is too monumental. They are more near to such poetic artists like Levitan and Polenov, and less known The Itinerants / Peredvizhniki : F.Vasilyev, L.Kamenev and Ostrouhov. If to go to the details of these Vietnamese pictures, look at their rivers, especially rivers twists. and river banks…. And roads, have you ever seen such roads and tracks in Vietnam? And this spirit of width and space? Sure this is The Itinerants. And this Vietnamese Mobile Artists group are 100% aware of this, and their group name is not fortuity.
Their intention will be more clear if they will explain their connection to this famous movement, since The Itinerants had very political statement: protested against the Academy, featured social injustices, put into practice their idea of mobile exhibitions and so on…..But the approach and innovations which had been very progressive in 1860s is difficult to see as exciting 150 years later…..
I am curious, do they suspect that in the Western crowd whom they consider as a potential consumers of their art, would be a couple of people who knows about The Itinerants / Peredvizhniki? I will direct one of the group who is in my FB friends list to this discussion.
Natalia, what you say is very interesting and truly thought provoking.
I do agree with you about everything you say and that this VN landscape art is not comparable to Shishkin’s work…
My mention of him was in a slightly different direction — that of a yet another side of the legacy of Peredvijniki movement (apart from what you say about their sociopolitical platform) — their works instiled in Russians the recognition of the unique characteristics and “the feel” of/for the Russian landscape — the “Russiannes” of the land, so to speak…
Since the element of “Vietnamesenness” in these works is almost undetectable — this seems to be non-valid point of comparison, but a point in trying understand the motivation for the production of this works.
Perhaps this group of artists did not really think in dept about the associations of the sort we are discussing and, rather than having a strong ideological platform, were more formalistic in their thinking… but, this as well is a speculation on my part…
Hi Jane,
You can get the basic info from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peredvizhniki
Re:…”Is the Russian influence still perhaps a long lasting influence from Vietnamese artists who went to Russia to study from the middle of the last century?”…
I do not know much about that… so, I am not able to answer your question…but, oil painting as a technique was introduced by the French.
Cheers
ps
Natalia,… thinking about the last remark in your comment… there is anoder possibility: it seems to me that these artists are actually aiming at the broad local market + the more astute local collectors as well as the foreigner crowd.
…and… if this is the case and as per our discussion above, then it appears and could be logically concluded that they are cleverly placing a historical significance on their works and themselves “by association & allusion”… remote control (?)
Ilza,
My friend, the same who noticed the absence of Vietnamese nature in the landscapes has the following explanation for the emergence of this group.
For some years she was a fan of Vietnamese singers’ group called AC & M which means A Capella and more, and read a lot about them. The story was that a group of boys from Saigon conservatory had very beautiful voices for classical singing and then one French friend advised them to sing a capella because it was a lacuna in Vietnamese music scene. Very soon they became popular with this undertaking and then began to sing just normally, like others, with the accompaniment of the instruments. So she guesses that these artists from Mobile group also try to feel lacuna – as you noticed there is no really landscape art in Vietnam…. Who knows, may be…..
To Jane:
another link with text and images on The Itinerants / Peredvizhniki is
http://www.russianpaintings.net/doc.vphp?id=128
I am wondering if you Russian discussionists have travelled much into the Vietnamese landsscape to know if your suppositions are at all proper and correct. Me, well I felt at home with the pictueres and i have been here as a traveller mot minh in the landscape for a lot of years. I want to know if you are being too presious about it?
ps; or is itthat you are feeling homesick or something?
I have appreciated all of your comments about this exhibition. They make me think deeply about it.
Sure Natalia… it could be as simple as that…and it would be interesting to see if this group is going to stick to the genre or was this just a whim?
CẢM ƠN!
Nature in Painting
Fine art has formed when human discovered the beauty of nature, since then nature has become a great master of many generations of the artists up to now. In any era, fine arts is always an opened road where has no place for old or new things but only the so-called “Beauty”. The development of fine arts in any form, no matter how it is, the nature of art remains unchanged. It has always been the personal feelings and created by appropriate visual language, including the exploration of one’s own way.
The sincerity of emotion, the experience in formation, and the deposition in each individual style have created a toward-colorful nature space of the “Mobile Young-Artist Group”. Share the common sense of purpose, the pursuit of fleeting emotions, suddenly come and go in the existing space with the distinct feeling of the uncertain human heart, the mixing between the vague and the specific things help find an appropriate way for each individual.
The idea of creation with nature has accelerated the young talent artists more sublimate in their art works and exhibition “Colors of Nature” has originated. Five young artists: Dang Hiep, Duy Hoa, Trinh Lien, Duy Tung, Le Thuy in their initial stages of career have found their own way to fine arts like that.
Young artists Group
@Anton Dubois
To answer your first question for my self: yes, I did travel and observed enough, but the point of our discussion was a strong similarity of this Vietnamese artist’s group with an important art movement, which had a profound impact on the country who’s artists produced it.
In this light — no, I do not see any preciousness in our comments and to answer your second remark — Russia is not my home and I do not feel any homesickness…
Dear Trinh Liên,
Thank you for your statement — I appreciate.
We are wondering here, if the “Mobile Young-Artist Group” feel any affinity or has been influenced by the19th century Russian movement The Itinerants/ Peredvijniki?
Would you kindly shed some light on this?
I wish you well in your artistic endeavors,
Ilza
To Anton Dubois:
Oh, only one Russian discussionist is here – it’s me. Another one – not, but just knows art history. I understand your concern and can answer your questions. I am not tourist here. My judgements are based on both – knowledge of Vietnam and of Vietnamese art.
I first came to Vietnam in 1983 and live here permanently not 30 but 25 years. Though I love more city life, I had enough time to travel in different places of the country too. I have no nostalgia since I visit my country almost every year for 3 months to teach Vieatnamese culture related subjects at the Faculty of oriental cultures, University of Human sciences, Moscow.
About my art background you can google: natalia kraevskaia, Salon Natasha, Vietnam
Yes, people can have different feelings and judgements, but in fact from all my friends who visited this exhibition I was more tolerant, since i always believe that young people have a lot of chances to progress and these artists are really very young…. And they have appreciated comments and wrote on FB that they are going to develop other themes besides nature and to think more deep and so on….
Ok, it’s just an answer to satisfy your curiosity… I really appreciate when people have disscussion, it means after the art event they don’t remain indifferent.
Ilza,
it seems than the guys from the group are quite happy about this discussion or about the fact of discussion. I wrote to Trinh Liên that if their statement would be stronger, more precise it would be easier to understand their goal. It looks like he agrees….
It’s good if not only observers but the artists will participate in discussions on hanoigrapevine as they do on soi
Natalia, yes — I was attempting in my previous comment (please see above) to entice the artists to say more on the question that puzzled us and their work…
In any case, I am glad that they see the benefits of public discussion like the one we have now on THG.
Thank you for your interest to our Young Mobile Artists group’s exhibition events, which were held at the Nguyên Art Gallery – 31 Văn Miếu Quốc Tử Giám Str. on January 12!
We have considered very carefully the issues you raised as well as comments in which the spirit to learn more about what we did and have been doing in Arts.
_About the problems that you set out, is our styles have influenced from the Russian artists that you quoted above, we would like to talk about this issue as follows:
In our learning process, we did, and always have admired such great artistic talents and find out in them many interesting ideas, as well as how to solve the problems of Arts or topics that have things in common.
_About the name of the group: “Group of Young Mobile Artists” as you know, the name did make us associate with “Group of Mobile Russian Artists”. This is easy to understand because the names contain the same.
We also studied the History of the World of Art and realized that the problems they pointed out is not the same as the projects of our team have been doing, the issue you have lightened before.
However, after the exhibition, we exchanged for changing the name of the group to “Moving Colors” to avoid violation and for people to easily visualize the work that the group head forward.
_About thoughts of Arts that we aim to: Đặng Hiệp, Duy Hòa, Trịnh Liên, Duy Tùng, Lê Thúy are the Five young artists have been living in the context of World Art in general and Vietnam in particular. There are many changes in developments of social, political, information technology, urbanization, etc… like a sudden rapid has pulled down it’s implications. The most striking are confusions in the way of creating art, especially for young artists like us.
This above laid out for us to have a change in behavior, to avoid being caught up in careers and trapped in the flow that most are looking for. Or can we say we chose a separate path in the current context in Vietnam, “The Return To Nature Composition”. That’s the purpose we choose to perform our Painting this time.
However, the name “The Return To Nature Composition” doesn’t just simply mean leaving the studio and go for a natural space. What we want is much beyond, Arts is built on the spirit of nature
_We still have so many projects to be done, and we will continue to implement to spread in many ways, especially with our country’s young generation to have more bright color, to paint, enrich feelings and expressions, sincerely and naturally as they are inherent in every human-being artists. So thank you for sharing your thoughts and your interest.
Best Regards,
Liên Trịnh Artist.
Dear Lien Trinh,
Thank you for the answer which shed light into many questions which were raised in the discussion. Really, many issues become much more clear when the statement is direct and honest. You should hang this text in the exhibition hall….
I admire the decision of your group to take your own path in art and support the idea that groups with different directions have a right to exist on contemporary art scene in Vietnam. What ever road in art you will take in your future, sure your painting skills and your thoughtful attitude to art will help you. Hope that the acquaintance with Russian Peredvijniki group will give your new ideas how to portray the specificity of Vietnamese landscape.
Wish you to develop your ideas and to move forward!
To Ilza,
you see, they are very serious guys but too much influenced formally by this The Itinerants / Peredvizhniki . I am sure that such discussions will help them to think more profound about heritage – influence – originality
To Trinh Liên,
Thank you for your thoughtful answer — I wish you and your colleagues fruitful journey on your chosen artistic path.
To Natalia,
Thank you for this intersting on line conversation —
you pointed out the most important issues for any serious artist.