”Hương’s Silk” Painting Exhibition at Vietnam Fine Arts Museum

Nguyễn Thu Hương, No Name, 80x80cm, 2019

Opening: Mon 30 Dec 2019, 5 pm
Exhibition: 30 Dec 2019 – 05 Jan 2020
Vietnam Fine Arts Museum
66 Nguyen Thai Hoc St., Ba Dinh Dist., Hanoi

From the organizer:

The exhibition includes 27 silk paintings whose backs have been all strengthened on Do paper. In particular, one among those paintings can be seen as an experiment that the painter tried to attach it with a turning axle to make a moving scenery.

Silk painting is a special material of the East, its origin associated with the Orient. When it comes to silk painting, people often think of its pure, dreamy and mystery

Throughout the history, silk paintings became a part of the up and down of a nation suffered in pain in thousand years. Silk painting range goes from as simple as rural life, urban woman, the landscape of the country to the reality of fighting labor in the cause of national reunification. Hence, what is beautiful, gentle, dreamy, and less conflict, people often assign silk material …

Nguyễn Thu Hương, Handkerchief, 80x80cm, 2019

As for Nguyen Thu Huong, a female artist, perhaps the dream is valuable to her. Over the past ten years, she has never changed her drawing style. Huong’s painting probably takes “femininity” as the main theme and it all revolves around it, whispering about it. And so, Huong has kept her style since entering the fine arts school up to now.

Huong chose silk as the main material in both her diploma project and her MBA thesis. You can tell that she was into silk from the very beginning. When mentioned about the influence of traditional silk paintings on her works, Huong said: “I still keep the traditional drawing style, which is, watercolor on silk, smooth silk, draw dry when mixed with moist silk color layer to create a new color, or smudging and Dó paper behind the picture. Silk itself is very fragile, smooth, little used to describe cube, light, and natural space acting like the way of oil painting.”

To conclude that Huong’s silk paintings are only modern, which is not entirely accurate. Huong inherited the thinking of previous generation to incorporate into her painting. Starting from the drafting stage, Huong paid attention to the distribution among the shapes, colors, strokes and gaps … Sometimes those gaps are the voice in her paintings.

The painter’s statement
I observe reality out there with my eyes wide open, because I want to understand the nature of things and phenomena, I want to find out what is the boundary of right and wrong, or bad, beautiful and
ugly … But, every image goes on.  With no wait, my mind could only save a very small fraction of reality.  And then, the subjective emotion and imagination, turned that little bit into another “reality”. As a train has passed, every image, color, shape, and sound saved in memory will cease to be it …
My painting records this.