KVT’s January Briefs… Collaborating @ The Art Museum

Getting it all together…

I don’t know how they managed it but they pulled it off nicely indeed.

In my experience a lot of artists are very egocentric and jealous about their precious output and there’s a great hullaballoo if anyone dares to interfere once their work is ready to be put on public display.

But the American overseer Mark Cooper has made a successful career out of co-opting artists of all stripes and persuasions into collaborative projects and this one, YU YU VIETNAM BLUE is a colorful, even riotous carnival- particularly with the smell of bubble gum ice-cream deliberately invading the two galleries

It’s enthusiasm is infectious and I daresay that if the exhibition was allowed to stay in one place and grow and fester for a few months, the whole jack and the beanstalk growth that weaves around and through would burst through gallery doors and start blooming and invading corridors and exterior walls and gardens, sending tentacles and mutating creatures twirling and twining up stairwells and holding hostage and janitor who fell asleep on the job.

I can just see the ants that are hatching out of a nest built by Chu Quynh that sits like a ripe boil on a wall and growing and developing as they invade their close surrounds growing in size and number and filling the gallery with a munching and a grunching before they burst through doors and windows and set their voracious appetites on the rumble tumble that is Hanoi… a typically Hollywood style horror movie scenario that only Captain America and his close Marvel comic allies could hope to blast into smithereens.

Though if I were directing the movie I’d have a huge blob of acid yellow and pink and azure blue bubble gum ice-cream lowered over the set that would drown the dreaded, male superheroes and spread a nauseating aroma of sickly sweet chemical dependency over the city… which is just about what our laundry liquids and household cleansers and personal body lotions and scrubs are already accomplishing

It’s that type of delicious and questing exhibition that can’t help but turn my prose from its, often, purple hyperbole into over hyped Technicolor.

All of the conceptual works by seven collaborating female Vietnamese artists are invaded by free form ceramic-ware and some by the cooperative input of their colleagues but just about all works poke their individuality through the colorful visual boom and bloom. You could see them standing alone in one of those sedate places that most people probably expect an art gallery to be like; where-in the chaotic banality of the outside world is held back by a well preserved atmosphere of reason and calm

My overall favorite (give or take the wonderful imaginative thought of melting bubblegum ice-cream) was the elegant fabric installation by Vu Thao who has fashioned her garments from the poisonous or hallucinatory inducing bark of the mountainous Sui tree. Light embraces dark – or is it death embracing life – or conformity squeezing out rationality – or …?

Tran Thi Tu’s mixed media wall installation is eye catching as, womb like, it embroiders itself out from or over its fading, red landscape. Its titled JUSTINE and may refer to the Marquis De Sade’s Justine (Therese) in his ‘Misfortunes of Virtue’ – a tale of ravishment and torture

The delicate water color on silk installation by Le Thuy is hauntingly beautiful as it takes you into, what I saw, as a Garden of Eden scenario just pre ejection from paradise with the female getting all the blame and being presented with a menstrual cycle that has allowed males lots of excuses to keep them in second place for far too long.

Nguyen Thuy Trang has a muddle of handmade, soft doll figures and asks WHO WOULD YOU WANT TO BE. It’s a nice display (that struggles a bit in the midst of Cooper’s large free form installation) but it wins through. It contains gender, sexual, racial, cultural and political choices and though Trang’s concept is not original in the world of female artists addressing feminist issues, I find it a thought provoking piece

Then there’s Kim Duy’s bubblegum ice-cream RED, BLUE and YELLOW whose melted aromas pervade the exhibition and which would be an overwhelming sensual art work if it could be installed in its own large space as a gigantic glob of ice-cream stickily melting – an ephemeral, smelly masterwork!

I could guess that the installation refers to the flag of National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (1966-77) that was subsumed into the National Flag as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, 1973

Surrounding and almost but not quite overwhelming the conceptual art works of the seven female artists is the YU YU works of Mark Cooper who has a kite maker, wood sculptor, graphic designer, and ceramic artisans collaborating with him

Those ceramics just about deserve an exhibition in their own right

PS: SORRY I MISSED A CLOSE LOOK AT THE BLUE BED… it was being investigated by a team of viewers and I was called away!

Why it’s titled YU YU VIETNAM BLUE is a mystery though if it is primarily investigating the Vietnamese female presence surrounded by a patriarchal culture then WHY YOU may well be appropriate

Not everyone was as enthused as I was with the overall effect and one lady took a run around the place and exited a little green around the gills

The exhibition is used as part of America’s acknowledgment of its 20 year old establishment of relations with Vietnam and if one is a little perverse and into metaphors one could ascribe it many to describe that country’s fractured relations with Vietnam.