KVT – The Fractal Patterns of Trieu Minh Hai

KVT gets his head into Fractals at Nha San Collective

A young friend who saw the latcrarf/fractal exhibition on its opening night said that he couldn’t understand it….but he liked it a lot. When I dropped into Nha San a couple of mornings later when I had the space to myself, I found the body of work invigorating and initially got enough pleasure out of it that I didn’t really care if I could make sense of it or not……Then after spending an extended perambulation around the space and uttering a few oohs and aahs of pleasure I decided that I’d try to understand what FRACTALS are and was glad that I had instant access to the internet

When I realized that it is a mathematical concept, and finding maths for me, that goes beyond a subsistence living level incomprehensible, I thought that I’d be stonkered but a few more clicks and the fog started to clear.

When I was living on the prairies of Manitoba, Canada, for seven winters when temperatures used to drop to minus 40 degrees F (which I think is about the same Celsius) I used to delight in looking at the frost patterns that grew and spread on some old fashioned window panes, little did I know that I was infatuated with fractals

Back to the show: Trieu Minh Hai, in collaboration with the curator Tran Luong, has mounted visually interesting work that friezes around 3 walls, graphite on paper, with one large fixed graphite on canvas to excite you further on the 4th.

People like me who take to art on a visceral level before they start to attempt to analyze it, like to get up close right away and with Hai’s work that’s a very intriguing and involving thing to do as the works are totally fluid and your visual sense is made to work overtime as you see along and through and around many images that, for me, appeared to be probing inside some organic body, flowing deep into microscopic depths and then streaming out again…tissues, blood vessels, organs, seminal fluids….

and in others, swirling around the solar systems, planets, and asteroids and being swept away with the minutia of cosmic particles and dust

In some cases details are as sexy as the curved line of Ingre’s Odalisque 

At times you feel as though you are twisting through the arches and caverns of a surreal Dahliesque landscape

Some viewers who become involved with the conceptual process will enjoy the English subtitled video of the artist at work as he expounds on terminologies like mandelbrot, julia sets and all sorts of wonderful words that mathematicians will be take on board with nary a blink of an eyelid

It could be correct to say that Trieu Minh Hai is making obsessive art work and it’s also quite correct to say that his obsession is quite magnificent. It is painstaking work, penciling strokes to make these fractal art works and close observation of the lines is rewarding as they, spiral, cross hatch or feather or splay or lose themselves in dense darkness.

Unfortunate there is no e publication about Fractals for Dummies but over coffee in the café next door to Nha San I found a really nice interactive site that begins: A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc. Abstract fractals – such as the Mandelbrot Set – can be generated by a computer calculating a simple equation over and over…….and even has a place that really made me feel far less dumb because I could use three colored buttons and fractalize a figure to my heart’s content

And then I turned to that wonderful invention Wikipedia which has a site that makes fractals seem like wonderful, everyday things (the video bits are gorgeous to say the least) ….so gorgeous in fact that you can understand why some visual artists are besotted. I still don’t have a clue what a julia set is but the Wikipedia example of one is outstanding

The amazing thing about the exhibition is an effect of calm even though you are in the midst of so much dynamic energy. But it’s like the calm before the storm and you expect that if you blink a graphite line may start to escape from its formal incarcerations and begin to replicate on the wall. In fact you get the feeling that if the artist had his way, and oodles of time, years, every inch of the gallery would eventually end up with fractals upon fractals, looping in and out on each other and that would then escape out the door, over the concrete and up the walls opposite. You can imagine them slipping under the doors and through the windows of the new Art Vietnam gallery, like spider silk (spider webs are fractals too….click here)

What delightful chaos!

By now I’ve probably tied my fractalization into unseemly knots so I’ll start to depart the arena with a link to a lot of impressive black and white fractals

Being an art viewer who gets as much visceral and sensual pleasure viewing fresh produce in a country wet market…I was really pleased when this cropped up as an example of a fractal that I could eat even if I couldn’t comprehend

Trieu Minh Hai has done himself and the Nha San Collective proud! His exhibition is well worth a visit and while taking it all in you may cogitate on its title. Its pre-occupation with streaming from the macro to the microscopic and back again fits well enough for me because that young friend who couldn’t understand it has, like me, been doing some research and he’s come up with the simplest definition of all: A fractal is any equation or pattern, that when seen as an image, produces a picture, which can be zoomed into infinity and will still produce the same picture.