KVT’s January Briefs… QUYNH DONG @ NHA SAN via SWITZERLAND – and Amsterdam and New York and Seoul and Singapore and…

NHA SAN REALLY HAS THE GOODS with this show

After a couple of locked doors over a couple of weekends I finally got into Nha San gallery to see the videos and sculptures of this mid thirty-ish artist who is flying fairly high in the international art firmament.

She’s a Swiss artist, born in Hai Phong in 1982 and, as a child, went with her parents to Switzerland via Hong Kong, studied art at a prestigious school, and has loads of talent as a sculptural, performance and video artist. Like so many people who grew up between two cultures and who are visible minorities in their countries of adoption, her works often investigate the feeling of being a stranger and not belonging to one place. Her considerable video and performance art output (some of which are shown here) reflect this.

At this stage in my opinion piece the following excerpt from an exhibition catalogue is apt: She reveals relentlessly the cracks of her own biography and processes her Asian heritage in very direct performances or impressive installations. Long-established, seemingly odd traditions and ceremonies are transferred carefully into the western world and with this she questions their existence in many ways. On the one hand, she wants to point out cultural differences and misunderstandings. But on the other hand, she wants to help herself recall actions and traditions, she thought were lost – also to be fully aware of these traditions. She x-rays her life consistently and chooses particular episodes, to interweave them with collective memories from her family’s history and world history. People she feels close to often become important points of reference in her web of relationships, which seems to build itself up but at the same time deconstructs itself. If nothing else, being immediate witnesses, they take over key roles in Dong’s works.

Nha San is lucky to have two of Quynh Dong’s videos, made in 2011/12 that are being exhibited in tandem in Singapore and which have a distinct Vietnam-ness. One is a peaceful 15 minutes long, and the other an equally peaceful 8 minutes. Peaceful but laced with irony.

MY-PARADISE is an idolization of paradise with a middle aged couple (whom I infer are the artist’s parents) residing a place that is an interpretation of utopian paradise. The set is a model of a peaceful, idyllic place constructed by the artist’s father and, for me, eerily resembles parks visited in Dalat or Ba Vi in the early 2000nds that had concreted waterfalls, animals and painted flowers and which were thronged with tourists who oohed and aahed over a representation of reality and who idealized it as more perfect than reality.

It’s a model of aspirational peacefulness that was (and perhaps still is) promoted by TV and tourist companies and that is still a backdrop video to syrupy romantic songs.

The human characters are transposed into the set and accompanied by guitar and violin musak (especially compose for the video) and, who, in perfectly tailored, often changed clothes that compliment the tacky set, posture and pose symbolically representing the eternally happy couple.

In one delightful scene they are blessed by the jade God and, in another, ride flying, white horses across a sky that romantics and lovers of cliché and fantasy will find irresistible

It’s not till the final scene where we realize that paradise is not without its digital connections that could lead to a paradise lost.

And which may have been suggested half way into the show

For me a disturbing reflection is that the and tackiness and clichés are indoctrinated into impressionable minds in the decorations and music of just about all of the nurseries and pre-schools I come across – impressionable minds of a generation that could have the glitz and glam of a shopping mall interior as their type of MY-PARADISE or the over the top manufactured excess of, say, a Vina Pearl resort as the ultimate aspiration.

The second video SWEET NOEL is also a delight and has as a referred setting a large 2mx5m lacquer work by Nguyen Gia Tri – who is credited for taking the craft of lacquer work out of the decorative and into the pictoral fine arts.

The work, ‘Spring Garden from the Center’ was commenced in 1969 and completed 20 years later and can be seen in the art museum in TP. HCM. It is said to be like a prayer for unity and happiness.

Quynh Dong concentrated on one half of the painting and substitute’s 11 images of herself in place of the females in the actual work. She takes away the children, changes the peacock into a swan (which I presume refers to the Moon goddess, Trang Chim and is a feature of both videos) and the unicorn – into a plastic rocking horse (a la the merry-go-round steeds in My-Paradise)

It’s a combination of syrupy music video, a TV soap opera and a painting. There’s not much movement in the video apart from the yellow horse moving across the screen and each figure in turn sings a portion of the 1940 Vietnamese love song Hai Mua Noel (Sweet Xmas) which was changed by American Vietnamese pop singers into a song to celebrate being sweet 16. The voice singing is that of the artist.

Of course it’s obvious that the artist is questioning and commenting on the stereotyping of women in both traditional and modern Vietnamese cultures and the delicious moment when snow starts to fall very gently upon the scene and we realize that she’s saying that it’s more than a bit stupid to expect women to stay trapped in a cultural identity (aka the touristy snow bubbles that trap a scene for perpetuity)

The visual metaphor can be extrapolated to just about all cultures and hence the universal impact of the video.

An excellent overview of Quynh Dong’s work is here and includes excellent reference to her ceramic sculptures a series of which are displayed at Nha San