KVT – Acrylic, Oil and Charcoal Dreams and Disintergrations

(Vietnamese version available – Đã có bản dịch tiếng Việt)

KVT up in the air in an opinion piece about Ha Manh Thang’s new exhibition at Manzi

I dropped into Manzi a week ago to see the exhibition of new work by Ha Manh Thang before it’s all-packed up (with a few other works not on show at Manzi) and sent to a gallery in Bangkok, after it closes on April 4

It was poetry. My type of poetry,.

All week I’ve been grappling with a response to Thang’s FADING DREAM; DISINTEGRATING REALITIES and getting a version of writer’s block when ever I sat in front of the keyboard. Then I started to read Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Enchantress of Venice’ and its sumptuous mixture of fable, history and dream spurred me to try and use words to explain Thang’s smokey, visual poetry…..so with apologies to the artist and the reader, here goes………..!

In his last body of work HEAVEN IS A PLACE showcased at Galerie Quynh in TPHCM. Thang’s architectural landscapes were, as one observer stated: ‘pared down almost to pure forms, and presented stripped of context, landscape human presence and even ornament…appearing to hover in unanchored space…as if the artist was seeking a critical distance from their iconic presence’. The new exhibition refers to the older work (as exampled here from that exhibition with a landscape of a building on the outskirts of the Citadel in Hue, and another of the Mausoleum in Hanoi, with their gridlines that ‘disappear to somewhat intriguing vanishing points’)

His monumental towers now appear to be impermanent, dissolving like melting sugar or vaporizing into that hazy smoke, eventually absconding into, or away from the grid that bound them to the earth and any sense of permanent reality..

To my mind, it could be that Ha Manh Thang is exorcising past work and clearing his way for new adventures, disposing of the past and memory into a metaphoric bonfire, the smoke of which he represents in two works on paper (behind glass)

It is almost as though he has looked back at a major influence, Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’…..

……and the ideas of perspective that revolutionized art in the Renaissance, and consigned them to a fire worthy of Savranola’s conceit and vanity. But then the metaphor could also imply that it is Savranola burning at the stake so that a new era of creativity will manifest after the smoke writhes and wreathes and dissipates

The works that initially made my pulse race were Thang’s representations of IMPERIAL ROBES seen below juxtaposed with those potent drawings of smoke

The robes, in an earthly guise in days of Imperial pomp and pageantry were heavy, lavishly ornamented, almost self standing architectural pieces as is suggested by the geometric grids that appear to anchor some and that disappear as others are released to freedom. Thang seems to have morphed these robes into architectural landscapes before allowing their levitation and suggested dissolve

In tune with the theme and intent of the exhibition, Thang’s new version of the robes has them floating, becoming light as air, like adornments for angels.

When you look at them closely you can see them lightly etched with cultural symbols and mythical animals that have often adorned Thang’s work in the past and may now be rising to their version of heaven…perhaps to be reincarnated in the future if this is, after all, an intriguing smoke and mirrors exercise by Thang, the maestro of metaphor a and painterly illusion

I found it a mesmerizing body of work and as I sat in solitude with a cooling glass of Manzi’s special guava juice I was drawn into their poetry, a poetry that a more adept person than me would set down in sonnets

Somehow one of my favorite of all is still the work on paper of an angelic robe lifting up one arm as if slowly, deliciously, being released from the pull of gravity.

Most of the excellent images from Manzi. Amateur attempts via the camera of KVT.