Exhibition Workshop “45 Days in the Old Quarter”
Opening: Fri 19 Aug 2016, 6 pm
Exhibition: 19 Aug – 10 Sep 2016
Center of the Old Quarter’s Culture Exchange
50 Dao Duy Tu, Hanoi
From the organizer:
Different from the conventional field trips organized by the Fine Art University where students are sent to travel outside of Hanoi to remote areas to further their drawing and sketching techniques, this trip is a reverse journey going back into the heart of Hanoi – the Old Quarter – a place with a long and turbulent history of formation, development and transformation over hundreds of years. The Old Quarter today is a living museum with overlapping layers of history, where you can see the past and the present coexist, where romantic and dramatic scenes struggle to live together.
Over the course of 45 days – the usual length of a field trip for Fine Art students, participants of this workshop had a chance to experiment a different approach to ‘documenting’ the reality. Each selected their stories and subjects based on personal interest, then conducted surveys, field trips, interviews, gathered materials using different approaches and mediums. This workshop acts as the first time participants received instructions on and experienced the procedure as well as skills employed in professional art practice, from building concept, writing proposals, statements and CV… to processing and selecting materials, constructing the structure of their works and presenting their works.
This workshop aims to encourage students to look deeper into the close, daily objects and occurrences that are likely to be overlooked. For example, the Old Quarter is a very interesting subject to research but it was not dealt with in a proper way by Hanoi’s art students, or sometimes if they do, their works are often centered around the personal aesthetic considerations, not an observation and exploration of reality. For that reason, with my personal experience of research and practice, by doing this workshop I want to inspire the selected students to find new ways of approaching the reality, find more freedom in expressing themselves and at the same time, to be more independent in their creative practices.
The result of this workshop shows us the diversity and abundance of their materials and methods in art-making. Without restriction on the types of materials nor methodologies, the exhibition presents all kinds from sketches, water colour, oil painting, silk, sculpture, print to installation, book art, sound art… each suits one individual’s idea and concept.
This exhibition presents different ways to express 11 students’ perspectives after their “summer field trip”, it’s also 11 points of view of 11 young artists towards the Old Quarter of Hanoi today.
– Nguyen The Son –
