Exhibition “Vu Dan Tan and Music”

Opening: Fri 07 Oct 2016, 6 pm
Exhibition: 08 – 28 Oct 2016, 9 am – 7 pm
Goethe Institut

From Goethe Institut:

Hanoi artist Vu Dan Tan (1946-2009) is a pioneer of Vietnamese contemporary art. His rich oeuvre, which spanned the mid-1970s until his death in 2009, is arthistorically significant in Southeast Asian and global art history for its original creative methodology and its sophisticated array of transcultural references that made sense of the evolving context of Vietnam in the world, post–doi moi. Vu Dan Tan’s art was innovative in its mixing of media and reference to multiple modes of cultural expression, including performance and music, both of which have deep roots in Vietnamese culture.

This new exhibition “Vu Dan Tan and Music”, commissioned by Goethe Institut, Hanoi to commemorate Vu Dan Tan’s seventieth birthday, explores Vu Dan Tan’s persistent interest in music and the ways in which the artist integrated music into his avantgarde visual practice. The exhibition presents music-themed artworks, pieces borrowing various aspects of music, pieces produced from objects associated with music, and a performative work with hands and improvised sound, filmed by Hanoi artist Nguyen Quang Huy. Many of the exhibition works have never yet been shown publicly in Vietnam or elsewhere.

These artworks span a wide spectrum of media. In addition, the exhibition features a curated selection of documents relating to Vu Dan Tan’s music-related practice, including musical scores and written statements where Vu Dan Tan offers ideas about the creation of an innovative Vietnamese classical music. Some scores are reproduced in facsimile form such that the Hanoi public may examine Tan’s compositions at leisure in the gallery space. Vu Dan Tan and Music also includes rare filmed documentation from the noughties of Vu Dan Tan playing piano and Hanoi intellectual Duong Tuong reciting poetry and giving an interview, that attests to the collaborative and innovative spirit of Hanoi’s contemporary art world emerging after 1990.

Through the exhibition, it will be argued that Vu Dan Tan’s work was closely connected with traditional Vietnamese culture as well as inserting itself into the wider current of Southeast Asian contemporary art that emerged in regional centres such as Bangkok, Singapore, Jakarta and Manila from the 1970s onwards.

The exhibition comprises paintings, borrowed and transformed objects, video of musical performance, and a sound-installation. The exhibition is curated by Iola Lenzi, a Singapore-based art historian of Southeast Asian art, and a specialist of Vu Dan Tan.

Vu Dan Tan and Music is organised in collaboration with Vu Dan Tan Foundation, Hanoi, and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated multi-essay research catalogue.

Iola Lenzi is a Singapore art historian and curator of contemporary Southeast Asian art. Also trained in law, she has curated numerous institutional exhibitions in Asia and Europe examining Southeast Asia’s social, cultural, and political landscape of recent decades through art. She teaches in the Asian Art Histories MA Programme of Singapore’s Lasalle-Goldsmiths College of the Arts, is the author of two books, and the editor/author of several research anthologies centering on themes of Southeast
Asian art history. Lenzi is currently pursuing doctoral research on early contemporary art in 1990s Hanoi at NTU, Singapore.

Free admission

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