KVT – Tran Duc Quy and his Portraits of Life

KVT is inclined to ramble on about some of the impressive life portraits by TRAN DUC QUY

****PART ONE: THE LUNCHEON****

On Friday I had a meal with a few locals who’d seen Tran Duc Quy’s latest art installation appear on a TV program and were curious enough to go to L’Espace and have a look

These locals weren’t your usual art gallery habitués or readers of cultural blurbs and blogs, just some run of the mill folk- late twentyish, from working class families, university educated, aspirational middle class, in full time employment in white collar type jobs, with a smattering of disposable income to throw about….and who’d all realized early on that to get ahead if you weren’t nepotistically connected or attached to a cash cow then fairly fluent English could be a distinct advantage.

They’d looked, they’d laughed and internalized and a couple of days later they were casually discussing what they’d experienced. Mostly the art work had re-inforced their existing opinions and there was resignation-tinged with bitterness- rather than anger in their observations. Spirited, often biting and satirical discussion flowed as political and socialogical events and characters were ascribed, often obliquely, to the installation by Tran Duc Quy

I’ll kindly sidestep their observations and conclusions and go to a very recent speculation by author Salman Rushdie as he talked about the repercussions that surrounded the Charlie Hedbo scenario. Not that it has all that much bearing on the contents of this opinion piece but it seemed an appropriate place to use it before it, like too much that I digest from media sources, is defecated into the limbo of useful but irretrievable information ……. ‘the role of art was to go to the edge, open the universe and expand minds. But doing that was not easy and artists could not occupy a middle ground.

‘And so artists who go to that edge and push outwards often find very powerful forces pushing back. They find the forces of silence opposing the forces of speech. The forces of censorship against the forces of utterance.

‘At that boundary is that push-and-pull between more and less. And that push and pull can be very dangerous to the artist. And many artists have suffered terribly for that.’

Thus far I’d not been to L’Espace to see Tran Duc Quy’s installation but it was on my MUST VISIT hit list and I was already in the middle of writing a bit of an appreciative, though necessarily oblique, rambling opinion piece about the artist’s ongoing LIFE PORTRAIT SERIES ….so I’ll continue where I left off before I had that co-incidental luncheon.

****PART TWO: THE BEASTS****

Recently at the Heritage Space in My Dinh I came across my favorite animal in Hanoi, proudly displaying itself in an empty hall

This magnificent beast reminded me that I’ve been waiting impatiently for some time for the next installment in Tran Duc Quy’s LIFE PORTRAIT SERIES

And at last it has inclined itself at L’Espace where Tran Duc Quy’s thought provoking art works that also used beasts as objects of social commentary have tended to start their public lives. There was a popular installment in the series with 36 cloned and brainless pigs made of pig skin leather.

Another had hundreds of plaster ducks with their heads tucked into the leaders’ bums, sharing the same vision of what constituted their world.

lots of critical thinkers did a 1+1 = 11 and exclaimed Wim Delvoye whose provocative Tattooed live pigs might have provided an inspiration as might have his Running Ducks

But to my mind…. why not!?- and so what!?

Every time I’m up close and breathing quicker next to a Wim Delvoye, be it a poo excreting machine or a life size cement mixing truck that has been exquisitely cut into steel lace or macabre stained glass windows I want to be in on it too and wonder how I could borrow and bend the concepts to my own peculiar whim and talent.

BUT BACK TO THAT WONDERFUL ANIMAL that sprouted myriad mirrors that revealed everything that was happening in its immediate vicinity…and which, if you were a little provocatively perverse or Orwellian inclined, you may have extrapolated it as Big Brother is watching you-as well as being a fabulous beast out of a fabulous tale of fantasy and wonder….

….but one that is ready to kick out and trip you up when you least expect it….perhaps a sting in the tail ending.

*****PART THREE: INCLINING TOWARDS SOME INFERENCES CAST BY AN INCLINED SHADOW****

Let’s get on with the show and fast forward to the here and now at L’Espace and Tran Duc Quy’s very imposing and very intriguing shadow play installation made up of a larger than life human beast and up to a thousand tiny negative replicas. My personal interpretations that now follow may have nothing in common with the artist’s intent!

Being of a figurative or metaphorical bent my mind immediately went into bing- bing mode and belly flopped into Gulliver’s Travels- into Lilliput. Luckily before I got too carried away with more fanciful stuff I bumped into the artist’s statement which is not too far from where little black figures are swarming around the giant figure’s crotch and anal regions.

the red lines = the management’s attempt to stop inquisitive people like kids and me getting up too close and personal.

Tran Duc Quy says that a lot of his inspiration for the portraits comes from the tales of his childhood and especially those by Hans Christian Andersen and by Ngo Thua An- also known as Ming Dynasty Chinese novelist Wu Cheng’en

Wu Cheng’en probably wrote ‘Journey to the West’ which a lot of us know as The Legend of the Monkey King and/or Monkey Magic. Kids throughout the world have thrilled and laughed at the rebellious Monkey King, Sun Wu Kong (Xuanzang), and his disciples’ action packed journey to the west amidst lots of magic, demons, gods and immortals who usually wish to destroy Monkey, even eat him, thus causing his disciples to employ violent measures to liberate him

Tran Duc Quy says the stories he enjoyed on a child level also had deeper, often darker, associations. Wu Cheng’en’s volatile epic criticized his contemporary Chinese political system and societal norms. Most western adults are cognizant with the double meanings and aspersions (often political) that were ascribed to well known fairy tales and nursery rhymes by their long ago authors

Hans Christian Andersen usually had deeper connotations behind a lot of his tales and I’m assuming that perhaps his darkest tale, THE SHADOW, motivated Tran Duc Quy’s INCLINED SHADOW installation

Most people don’t read that particular story to their kids because it’s too scary (and also because it probably wasn’t read to them as kids). It’s usually high on the list when academic students have to study the life , work and darker shades of Hans Christian Andersen. It was used by French Canadian director Robert LePage in 2005 when he was invited to Paris to devise and direct his ‘The Andersen Project’ to celebrate the storyteller’s bicentenary. The story anticipates Freud and Jung and suggests that each human has a shadowy part (or parts) that will, if you don’t have control, destroy you. This may be what is happening to Tran Duc Quy’s pot bellied figure as he inclines closer and closer to his many shadowy phantoms.

Andersen’s tale suggests that evil very often triumphs over the just and the good and ‘The Shadow’ has been described as a cautionary story about the evolution of a sociopath…as well as a story of how one becomes enslaved to a sociopath

In Quy’s work this enslavement may be imagined by the postural attitude of the shadows that may have already sold their souls, or have been forced to sell their souls, to the devil

In the case of the sociopath, more slaves are harnessed as the need arises, or discarded at will

Viewers may recall some of Andersen’s other tales as they ponder upon Quy’s work and one that readily comes to mind when you snigger at the half clad figure is THE EMPORER’S NEW CLOTHES in which the ruler was vain and self obsessed

As for the small figures clambering over the main character’s upper body, I’m sure, that like my young Vietnamese friends, your own experiences and imaginations will help you conjure up a couple of scenarios.

The very cunning little white figure that is appearing or disappearing from/into one nostril could cause me to magic up several more sentences but I’ll politely desist.

One student of Andersen’s Shadowy tale analyzed that the author was also implying that beauty and truth have no place in a world rule by appearances…and this implication sets more philosophicaly inclined worms loose to wriggle into my imagination; but I’ll let them fester there until a chance comes along to let them ooze into a future opinion piece.

EXCELLENT WORK TRAN DUC QUY! You made my day yet again!