KVT – A Journey into Night? @ Dong Phong

KVT enjoys exploring the way of Ta Dinh Khiem’s mind

Ta Dinh Khiem has a refreshing, mini- exhibition at the intimate but very welcoming Dong Phong Gallery in the very up-market Ly Dao Thanh Street.

Another good reason to get along to see the show is the excuse to sample one of the refreshing ice-creams or gelatos at the distinctly French style pavement café next door

Ta Dinh Khiem’s new canvasses are all mixed media, often with an initial layer of newsprint overlaid with squares and rectangular pieces of material of different thicknesses and weaves.

Backgrounds range from pitch black to abstract grays

The exhibition is called The Way of the Mind and with that in mind I offer a translation that I hope may accord with the artist’s intent

The piece that hits you in the eye is this dramatic red work with the almost too white centre (80cm x 100cm)

With its scrumbled newsprint background I immediately thought of a dominating Chinese character or logogram –or part thereof. It’s as powerful and potent as symbols on gateways and perhaps could be read as a symbolic gate opening into a lovely grouping of work

In contrast the other canvasses have a cool serenity to them, and my first impression was that they are landscapes viewed from above…. close up Google maps with fields and swamps bisected by a single road or path. The fact that daylight is either being leeched from the scapes by closing night, or conversely that they are slowly illuminating and being drawn into focus by soft dawn light, adds to their narrative appeal-for me!

However you approach Ta Dinh Khiem’s new works, it’s easy to fall under, their seductive spell

I’ve been sort of following the abstractions of the artist since2008 when I first saw some at a show at Mai Gallery’s fabulous but now sadly unused little annex in Phan Huy Chu Alley- a standout show called DUET that he shared with a talented colleague Dinh Quoc Vu

A year later both artists starred at a threesome exhibition at the Art museum and I became really effusive and wrote the following about Khiem’s large canvasses in a Grapevine opinion piece:

The large canvasses by Khiem are, like last year, really arresting and I don’t know yet if I read them as light being swallowed by blackness or blackness being slowly conquered. Khiem use black lusciously and there’s almost a bituminous look on the paintings. A lot of people like the gridded or loose geometric abstractions that have color dominant but I fall deeply into the ones that are almost mysteriously concealed. The triptych was very good and my favorite is ‘Moonlight’ with its slash of yellow escaping horizontally across the canvas. I can’t help it but everytime I see Khiem’s black pieces the name Anselm Kieffer flicks into far recesses of my mind for a second or two and I enjoy that. It’s a bit like a slice of light purling through the brain’s black curtains

Unfortunately, in 2009, we weren’t really into the digital camera era so I can’t present a montage of his work from those two exhibitions but following is a meager tribute to Ta Dinh Khiem’s progression from eye teasing abstractions through to delicate landscapes-and cityscapes- that invariably seem to me to be exquisite map making-and occasionally geological layering- exercises and are usually on large canvasses…. (not in chronological order)

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT

STREET NIGHT

SPRING FIELD

RAINY MOTION

SOUL OF NIGHT

SUMMER ROCK

WINTER ROCK

ROCKWAY

FALL

DEEP BLUE SEA

DEEP BLUE SEA

It’s an exhibition worth catching (as is the ice-cream next door) and in the window of the Gallery is (to my mind) one of the nicest pieces of art to come from Hanoi in the past ten years-a fossilized piece of Long Bien Bridge by Vuong Van Thao – selling at a ridiculously low price