Exhibition “Mơ” by Dang Viet Linh

Opening: Sat 25 Jul 2015, 6 pm
Exhibition: 25 – 29 Jul 2015
Vietnam Fine Arts Museum

From Artists of Vietnam:

“Mơ” is Dang Viet Linh’s first solo exhibition, marking his achievement through the past 3 years of being a professional artist.

Dang Viet Linh always dreams about a world like Eden, where humans live without any cultural and racial discrimination; where freedom, joy, happiness and kindness reign.

Review of artist Nguyen Nghia Phuong about the exhibition:

Studying at Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Art, Dang Viet Linh is passionate about creating independent artworks. While the Industrial Fine Art University requires logical thinking, Linh’s artwork is utterly free, spontaneous, and almost skips all regular, schooling rules for creating shapes in a painting. These are the first observations when knowing Dang Viet Linh and admiring his artworks. Is there actually any conflict at all? To take it into consideration, there is no contrast between Plastic Art and Industrial Art, each has its own function. In visual art today, freedom, recklessness and “unusual feature” are always appealing, even in practical art or pure art. To have something that unusual in his artwork, the artist has to be up on the air and dares to “dream”, dreaming about a strange land, dreaming about a mystical, unreal place or a story streaming without opening and ending. To Dang Viet Linh, artists always dream and dream more about a world like Eden, where humans live without cultural or racial discrimination; only freedom, joy, happiness and kindness rule that land.

Being a very young artist, born in 1993, Dang Viet Linh is similar and yet dissimilar to other young people at his age. Born and growing up in an integrated world, obviously Linh together with his generation have a different eye on the whole world and the world inside each human being. Linh’s own art world is a melting pot of many cultural origins, a world consisted of stories that are both traditional and modern, bearing in it hidden questions from all ages and lands. Thinking that the modern world is always flat and fair; all languages, cultures, races… are connected and overlapped to make the whole picture of a civilized and integrated society, Dang Viet Linh has created more than 20 psychedelic, surreal paintings. Linh’s artworks are the fusion and improvisation of bright flat blocks of colors to form a visual language with highly decorating patterns. Motifs in Linh’s paintings bear signals to recognizable traditional culture and modern art of not only Vietnam but also many other countries in the world. Combining all these things in a big picture, the artist wishes to visualize his dream about an integration of all people in this planet because to him, we are all born in the same way, all have dreams and desires like each other.

The gouache on Do Paper paintings of Dang Viet Linh strikes the viewers instantly by bright and joyful blocks of colors, just like they are happily dancing on the white wrinkled Do Paper. Almost all the shapes painted naturally float in a surreal space. Blocks of colors or details are separated by white lines, thus increasing the decorating purpose of flat blocks. This triggers a sense of a delightful and peaceful space of the viewers. The art images in Linh’s artworks are the combination of pluralism and multi-dimension; they are angels, white–winged magical horses, Botticelli’s Venus; dragons and phoenixes from Eastern culture; musicians or dancers of Matisse; traditional and modern Vietnamese girls; ethnic people with colorful clothes; weird animals usually appeared on folk paintings in many places on the planet. Flying people, colorful concertos in Linh’s paintings seem like pouring from somewhere in European glass paintings, Middle Asian and Anatolian carpet decoration art; images derived from African, Latin American or Australian aboriginal culture; Vietnamese clothing and folk art; from religious art to Renaissance art, and then to artworks by Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt and paintings by Surrealism artists now and then. Generally, with syntheticism, Dang Viet Linh not only brings about an aesthetic, cultural space that has a sense of humanity, but also expresses the sense and consciousness of a person in an integrated age. The art of Linh reflects naturally both the thinking and the emotions of nowadays young people, but also has a consistency in building images, icons and languages. This fact shows that the art arises and pours out of the artist’s heart, out of real dreams, dreams that are pure like children’s, dreams about a happy human society.

Paintings from “Mo” exhibition will be displayed at The Vietnam Nation Fine Arts Museum in the upcoming time are Linh’s journey to find the answer for the question: “Beyond our real, busy life that we know, is there any world?” Linh states that everything has its own soul and language. Reflecting his own obsession and adventure into dreams, immersing himself into his imaginary world to find freedom is a method that has been used by many artists before. However, struggling to find the answers for the artists’ mental concerns, for life desiring to reveal his soul, is endless. Each human being is a character, a small planet, so each artist has his own way to find that answer. The collection “Mo” of Dang Viet Linh is an ordinary dream with distinctive and yet, familiar visual language. Linh’s dream is also what all humans wish: a good life that is always cheerful and free, where people cherish everything they own, live to the fullest, a bit instinctively, a bit wildly, a bit adventurously and riskily, where people dare to dream and dare to follow their dreams till the very end.

About the artist:
DANG VIET LINH
(19/11/1993)
Born : Viet Tri – Phu Tho.
A 4th-year student of Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Art, majoring in Art
Attended exhibitions:
2007: Exhibition for ethnic minorities of mountainous region of the North Viet Nam at Viet Nam Fine Arts Museum (awarded the second prize)

2008, 2011, 2013, 2014: A exhibitions of Sector III by Vietnam Arts Association.
2013:
– Exchange exhibition with Korean artists in Vietnam
– The second exhibition for promoting Vietnam art at Denmark Embassy in Vietnam
– “Story of growing person” exhibition hosted by UNESCO Vietnam, Ministry of Education and Training, Vietnam museum of Ethnology at Vietnam museum of Ethnology.
2014:
– International open exhibition in Seoul, Korea
– The third exhibition for promoting Vietnam art at Denmark Embassy.
– Hanoi Open Exhibition II at Work room four.
– Vietnam art exhibition about the army force and revolutionary war.
– Had paintings exhibited at Korean cultural center in Vietnam.
– Had paintings collected by private collectors from America, Korea, China and Vietnam.