KVT – The Southern Journals… Part Five

Has the locus of Vietnamese contemporary art shifted from Hanoi to HCMC?
KVT headed south to take a look for himself. The result is a series of articles about his encounters.

Read more articles here.

EXPERIENCING THE EXPERIMENTAL SPACE

Apart from the legendary and internationally respected Nha San Duc, now renamed Nhasan Studio, Hanoi’s non profit experimental art spaces have come and gone like butterflies emerging from their chrysalises, and like those creatures most have had a short life before becoming memories. A couple of later ones, especially the tin shed out in the industrial boondocks across the DuongRiver, had lots of promise

It’s hard to be an experimental art space in Vietnam for a variety of obvious red tapey reasons and it seems too difficult to have a prolonged life history if a non profit space hasn’t got long term funding.

A lot of spaces commenced with funding from their initiators and stumbled along as they built their reputations. Some had the expertise to apply for grants offered by various embassies and their NGOs.  Some were asked to close their doors by officialdom and others collapsed due to lack of money.

At the beginning of 2012, Hanoi, it seemed to me, had just about been experimentally gutted although the year strutted through with the occasional flare up of experimental excitement and ended with ‘Skylines with Flying People’ which lifted my hopes that a renaissance may be in the offing

So on my excursion to the southern provinces I was eager to see how TPHCM was experimentally faring.

As San Art was amongst the first of the experimental spaces in Saigon, because it had survived against the odds since 2007 and because it gets good press it was a place that had to be investigated

San Art (apparently it means a platform for the arts) was started by four successful Viet Kieu artists and has managed to attract funding from institutional and private sponsors and donors. It has a long term curator who has a good international reputation and is experienced and recognized in the wiles and wares of South East Asian contemporary art.

Their website tells it all far more eloquently than I can and as a 2010 MoCA article says: San Art’s programs address the huge lack of  access to resources and expertise in areas of art history, theory, exhibition making, curatorial practice, multi-discipline ideas of art making and criticism.

San Art is comfortable. Like just about all the art spaces I saw in the southern city, it’s smaller than you imagine being most of the ground floor of a middle size, middle class villa. There’s a little courtyard, a well resourced reading room, and a gallery space. The top floors are taken over by the very exciting sounding and doing ‘Propeller Group’ of artists who have a San Art founding father in their trio which is a cross disciplinary structure for creating ambitious art projects (see this link to SFMOMA for their re-branding Vietnam World Tour) Their backgrounds in film and video probably prove enormously useful for their downstairs neighbors.

I was able to catch the end result of San Art’s latest initiative, ‘San Art Laboratory’, a rigorously selected residency program which provides studio and living space for 3 Vietnamese artists under 35 years old for 6 months. A stipend is given to cover essential living and art production expenses. During each residency (lab) the winning applicants have to do regular writing and discussion about their work and ideas with a specific ‘talking partner. At the end of it all there is a group exhibition of work in the San Art gallery space.

Hand in hand with the lab there is apartment and studio space available for a selected international artist

For young artists from countries such as Vietnam , experiences gained in well designed residencies are enormous and it’s the experiences that are more important than the results realized in the final exhibition…which in this case are really nice pieces by Tuan Mami from Hanoi, Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai from Hue (check an earlier KVT bit on her brilliant In and Out vaginal speculum) , and Truong Cong Tung from Daklak

Tuan Mami’s dead cockroach family got me going and his book of 1000 art objects that lost its context is excellent.

Truong Cong Tung’s series about when everything becomes strange were interesting experiments using a variety of media.

‘Skylines With Flying people’ was a microcosm of San Art’s mission:  to empower established and emerging artists in Vietnam and the broader South East Asian region, by nurturing talent, fostering innovation and providing a forum for collaboration among local and international creative communities. Offering space and opportunity for artistic engagement by way of exhibition and education programs, San Art operates as a hub that connects and facilitates discussion and projects between local and visiting artists, curators, writers, researchers, arts workers and many more. Exhibitions showcase talent from home and abroad, encouraging foreign guests to spend additional time with our audiences via talks, workshops, lectures and, where of interest, the collaborative creation of new work. The target audience of our programs is the thriving Vietnamese cultural community, while seeking equal opportunity to showcase their talent abroad”.

Really, it’s all about empowering young artists as much as possible to get out there and take risks

WISH WE HAD YOU HERE, SAN ART….as long as you bring a clone of the Propeller Group with you