Home Event Listings Art Phạm Đình Tiến & Phạm Hà Ninh

[TGS – Introducing Artists] Phạm Đình Tiến & Phạm Hà Ninh

Posted on 02/07/2023

The Grapevine Selection, was initiated by Hanoi Grapevine’s founder – artist Brian Ring exactly 10 years ago in 2013. The exhibition series The Grapevine Selection is an initiative within Hanoi Grapevine’s mission plan, which is to promote Vietnam’s arts and culture at home and abroad.

The Grapevine Selection 2023 is a bold experiment when placing contemporary works of outstanding artists, from painting and sculpture to installation in a space rich in cultural heritage such as the Temple of Literature – Quoc Tu Giam to a modern high-end industrial space like Audi Charging Lounge. Hanoi Grapevine hopes that the change in space will not reduce the audience’s experience of enjoying art, but will resonate with works of unique beauty, increasing the sensory experiences by cross-linking exhibition spaces and themes, a trend that will explode in Vietnam in the future.

The Grapevine Selection 2023 selected 53 artworks from 16 artists from the following areas of art practices: Painting, Sculpture and Installation with consultation from the Art Advisory Board.

Artist Phạm Đình Tiến

Phạm Đình Tiến was born in 1988 in Lam Dong. In 2012, Đình Tiến finished his Undergraduate studies with a major in Sculpture. Currently, Đình Tiến is an instructor at the Faculty of Sculpture, Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts, and has attended multiple group exhibitions, such as the 5th National Exhibition of Sculpture at the Hanoi Museum of Fine Arts (2013), the Exhibition for new compositions at the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine (2013), “Come to [what] end?” at San Art (2014), “Chung” at PongDang Gallery (2014), the International Sculpture Symposium (2015), the Sculpture Exhibition “Hanoi-Saigon” at the Hanoi Architectural University (2016), “FOLIAGE” at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCAA) (2017), and Exhibition of silk paintings and small sculptures at VCAA (2018). In 2022, Phạm Đình Tiến hosted the first solo exhibition named “Wandering Age” at Craig Thomas Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City.

The Lucky Farmer
Vietnam has been a wet rice civilization for thousands of years, but I often see gold artifacts bearing the image of kings and figures of religions. We rarely see such artifacts being engraved in the form of a commoner. The work is a statue of a farmer based on an image taken from the 19th century, recast in gold to see if the precious material will bring the peasant the aura of a king.

Curfew
The work takes a bit of inspiration from the image of a god but transfers to the detailed physique of an ordinary person. The farmer’s best friend is the buffalo that has the strength to work hard but is slow in thinking. The woman is the mother, the wife, and the daughter of the farmer, who lives by the law and keeps the law.

Artist Phạm Hà Ninh

Phạm Hà Ninh is a visual artist born in 1991 in Hanoi. Hà Ninh graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2014 and became a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Ha Ninh uses different materials in his practice, including paintings, sculptures, and printing. Hà Ninh’s practice emerged from many concerns of a youngster from a generation usually referred to as 9x. This generation came from a fast-changing time when Vietnam started to experience new media, technology, and globalization. Hà Ninh’s choice of traditional ways of expression in the arts is a natural medium to seek their identity. Ninh is actively engaged in the local art scene with different projects, hoping to develop the art community in Hanoi. Ninh participated in both exhibitions organized by the state and private spaces. Hà Ninh received the Silver medal for Young Student Talent of Arts and Culture universities in 2014 in Vietnam and the prestigious Trustee Scholarship from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.

“My work explores how we construct an understanding of territory from afar through reported materials. Since 2017, I have been working on a long-term project titled My Land, in which I design a world that does not correspond to any known culture in human history. This project consists of paintings, sculptures, drawing scrolls, and video games representing maps, artifacts, steles, and stories of an imagined territory. The territory has its systems of logic, language, and cosmology that only refer to themselves but are fully functional. I want to see how far I can go in persuading that the territory does exist. The project is also a thought experiment of a phenomenal environment in which the personal experience of any viewer is stripped away. They must completely abandon their invalid cultural legacy to navigate this world.”