KVT – Stabling Horses at L’Espace

KVT enamored with some provoking ponies

There’s an eye catching installation at L’Espace. Seven larger than life horses are standing very patiently in the foyer, welcoming people with silent neighs and whinneys and nikkerings.

The horses began their lives just like the one below…..woven with bamboo strips

until there is a definite equine shape

and they are prepared for dressing up

in a papier mache hide

and finally given a glittering coat before they are sold and offered up for display or burning at various temples

which is where I first became infatuated with them, at a temple in Bao Ha on the banks of the Red River about 40 km south of Lao Cai where hundreds of the large, paper horses are displayed for the faithful or the opportunistic to purchase.

I’ve called it the horse temple ever since I discovered it in, what was a little backwater place, about 15 years ago. With new roads to Lao Cai and new bridges across the Song Hong the backwater is flooded with thousands upon thousands of people every year anxious to be in session with the many mediums of the Mother Goddess who, during certain festival days and propitious moons, drown the once calm ambience with the heady chaos and delicious confusion of their trances and audio enhanced live musicians ….all the while observed by those gaudy, haughty horses.

Whenever I see a herd of undecorated woven horses au naturel I am overcome with a desire to buy a batch and do something exotically different to them.

But I procrastinated too long and very creative artist, Trieu Tuan Long beat me to it with his herd of seven that have occasionally been glimpsed escaping from his studio to pop up around the city.

Until they have finally been stabled in L’Espace for a month, nodding their heads contentedly

The horses have been coated with images, transferred on Boi paper, and applied to a papier mache hides. Architectural images are of structures that have become iconic and which have same or divergent meanings to Vietnamese and French people. Viewers will easily pick out the horse dedicated to the Long Bien Bridge and to its associated elder sister structure in Paris, the Eiffel Tower.

Seemingly haphazardly scattered over the horses are photographic images of French expat and Vietnamese lifestyles since the beginning of French colonization.

To me the installation appears to be asking if and how the attitude of the French towards Vietnamese people has changed since their paternalistic though cruelly sadistic, often murderous and very exploitative attitudes and behaviors that prevailed about the time of the opening of the Long Bien Bridge.

Even though the French were deservedly crushed and crimpled at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 but did a nice about face during the American War and hosted various peace conferences… and the French anti war protestors were in high profile and pro Uncle Ho and his followers in the lead up to the 1975 expulsion of the USA and their coalition of the willing… its very valid for modern Vietnamese to try to decipher just how the general French public now regards the people they once abused and enslaved.

With a distinct right wing element ascendant in the French political scene, a lot of locals in Hanoi and Vietnam must have a few drear and dread thoughts about white supremacist attitudes and theories crawling like cockroaches out of the cracks in the French sewer systems….as they are doing are in too many European countries.

If the installation is subtly posing observations such as the above and if both French and Vietnamese are honestly discussing the same, then it could be described as powerfully provocative ……but, then, does art really have any power to change anything?

This installation is not the first time I’ve seen Trieu Tuan Long being provocative.

In 2012 he joined in with a lovely gang of artists to protest at how the local rich, loaded and powerful were not supporting Vietnamese artists or art works.

He took Fragonard’s slightly pre French Revolution Rococo painting ‘The Happy Accident on the Swing’ where a young aristocrat peers up the dress of a tempting young socialite.

The painting period unintentionally portrayed a world of artificiality and make-believe and game playing by the aristocracy and emphasized their unreflective and indulgent lifestyles, in particular at the Palace of Versailles. A lifestyle that the revolutionaries soon made redundant for a couple of decades and who sent a bevy of Fragonard’s characters to appointments with Madame Guillotine ( which was also a big feature of French colonial rule in Indochine). Fragonard slipped away into the countryside and obscurity.

In Long’s painting it seems that the erotic voyeurism – evidenced by Fragonard by the noble reposing on the grass – is replaced by making us, the adoring viewers, the fawning voyeurs of a member of a modern aristocracy.

Back to that herd of horses…….my apologies to the artist if I got his intentions all back to front

BUT I DO RECOMMEND THE EXHIBITION FOR A CLOSE PERUSAL…CLOSES 26th

Thanks to L’Espace for their patronage and encouragement of the art scene in Hanoi