KVT – Once Upon the River Love

KVT steals the title from Andrei Makine’s poetic novel to enthuse about Tran Trong Tri’s memorable boat and water exhibition at the Art Museum

If you’re lucky enough, sometimes you enter an art exhibition and you realize that, somehow, it feels as though it was made especially for you alone.

The last time that happened to me in Hanoi was in 2009 when Doan Hoang Kien had an installation of red and white bamboo poles at the Viet Art gallery

…..and when later that year his 500 red and white poles soared as a structure adorned with 3 000 mirrors in the Convergence of Light fest in Ngoc Thuy Village near the banks of the Duong River

Mind you, for me, 2009 was one of those extraordinary Hanoi-an art years whose excitement would be hard to replicate

The fact that the same effect is not felt by other viewers is irrelevant. For me that certain special feeling stays with me and if someone asks me to list memorable art events, these rare ones push to the fore. Some are in the lexicon of great art and others are fly by night flashes in the dark, as ephemeral as firefly twinkling’s.

Yesterday, a handsome, 39 year old artist with a memorably alliterative name provided me with another of those personal identification sensations at the Art Museum

Tran Trong Tri has installed his first solo exhibition called A Trip and the image that went along with the shows PR gave me a premonition that I just might fall head over heels into it

And I did!

Large scale canoe-like water craft fly and float through the second gallery, suspended or kept from escaping by rope and block and tackle

All nine boats are impractical and would sink or gradually disintegrate if launched into a stream or body of water. They are the sort of craft constructed by the imaginative and resourceful kids who have an urge to invent and explore and escape into the unknown.

At the same time you’re aware that the voyagers are packed and ready to push out into metaphorical streams

In some way I was transported back to long ago kid-times when we spent days making corrugated iron canoes on the banks of swamps and beaches and paddled them into mysterious places until they sank or we grew weary of bailing out water. When we made wonky rafts out of planks of wood and old inner tubes and poled through waters seething with imagined piranha to islets that imaginations infested with poisonous snakes or man eating pythons-until it was time to go home for dinner

Unfettered kid days when we spent sunburnt, skin peeling days constructing those leaky and unstable craft to fulfill our desire for adventure (whatever that was! And which in all our tales was always adult free)- fueled by the exploits of our literary heroes such as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on the Mississippi or Ralph, Peterkin and Jack in the Coral Islands of the south seas or the Storm Boy and his pelican in the brackish estuaries of the Murray River

Our spasmodic episodes of boat building and imaginative voyaging was never dampened for long even when careful, unadventurous adults, such as concerned parents, fed us with tales about some lone kid on a lone journey disappearing into the murky waters of a swamp and whose body was dredged up later nibbled at by fish and frogs or worse; or when kids using an cut off car roof as a ship was taken out to sea in a rip and eaten by sharks.

At the first downpour of winter rain when creeks and streams and gutters rushed headlong who could resist the chance to make small models of impervious boats and let them race pell mell taking their chances with the sticks and surging froth? Oh the adventures those minute craft and crew had in creative minds!

It’s funny how sometimes the quest for adventure kindled by small boats and flowing water isn’t drained when the attitudinal clothes of conservative adulthood have to be put on.

When I see an island on a hazy horizon I have an urge to paddle out to it.

It’s the reason why I’ve hired small boats with outboard motors to take me up and down any navigable Vietnamese river, often on spur of the moment impulses. Why I keep wanting to go back to the Mekong for more long weeks of trawling its tributaries and canals. Why whenever I’m on the banks of the Duong River just outside Hanoi and a fishing craft paddles or motors past I am determined that someday, soon, I’ll hire one to take me, slowly, all the way to Hai Phong.

Give me the option of a white sheeted bed in a 5 star luxury cruise around Halong Bay or a hammock on the deck of a small fishing boat that wil explore the furthest reaches of Bai Tu Long for a month and I’ll take the latter.

I guess it’s got something to do with wanting to find out what’s hidden around the next bend in the river.

In a roundabout way I hope I’ve encapsulated some of Tran Trong Tri’s philosophical intent which he presents succinctly and without art talk hype in his artist’s statement that’s available at the gallery entrance

Above is an example of the artist’s exploration into the theme of his journey of self discovery where-in boat and water have become central to the imaginings in his art work. This vessel is not in the present exhibition but it is a beautiful and meditative sculpture……As is another water filled piece by the artist that sits in a downstairs area at the Mai Gallery and which I have long thought is one of the classiest bits of art in their collection

In the second gallery at the museum the artist has installed 7 craft or vessels that float along the steam of his philosophy. They begin with opaque composite craft lit from within which were a spin off from his work up to 2011

The next two vessels, representative of an ongoing voyage, are vessels of polished steel filled to their lapping brims with metaphorical water

Then came a series in copper with green patina-ed boats brimming with what could be reflected sunset- or red silted river water.

Then came the last craft with its beautiful visual poetry; solid, metaphorical water catching imprints of footsteps, as if it were saturated sand. And, magically, exposed beneath is deep, dark, mysterious water

And then there’s the complimentingpart of the exhibition where it, again, seems to be made just for me!

Following on from the footprint motif in the last vessel is a rivered pathway, actually a 3 tributaried pathway, made of hollow steel (aluminum?) blocks all flowing with flashing water that has recently been dislodged by an explorer’s foot

…..but sometimes you can be excused for imagining that tiddler fish or tadpoles are flirting and flitting in the shallow reaches

The river flows in relief across a landscape, in improbable flow-but that’s the beauty of imagination or poetic licence!

I love how the tributaries lead us toward the place where the real boats have gathered like beached dreams

Thanks Tran Trong Tri for giving me my personalized exhibition and I hope that other viewers find their own streams of magic and poetry and crafts of adventure within it.

Many will find spiritual allusions abounding especially in the Christian context…walking on water etc. I could see those water filled vessels as christening fonts in Episcopalian churches
Wonderful stuff!