KVT – Fence

FENCE AS STATEMENT
Some Hanoi-an artists take delight in producing art as social comment…. satirical, ironical or farcical. Stretching along Xuan Dieu and down Dang Thai Mai is a huge photographic installation that could fit all categories..though I think that a lot of viewers take it very seriously.

I call it ‘The Marie Antoinette Frieze’, subtitled, ‘let them eat cake!’ (a saying ascribed to the soon-to-be-headless queen but apparently not uttered by her Austrian lips).

The pictures depict the interiors of apartments in a twin tower complex about to rise from the red sand of a neighborhood soccer stadium. There is a delightful mix of Louis Quatorze baroque furniture and the assymetrical and natural motifs of French regency combined with the essentially feminine elegance of Louis Quinze all graciously put next door to the neo-classicism and rococo of Louis Seize and delicately elaborated with pieces showing the restrained symmetry of the Marie Antoinette style.

All it needs to make it perfect as an art statement is for a performance artist to stand near it and give a continuous reading of that great 1930’s Vietnamese satirical novel ‘Dumb Luck’ (So Do)* by Vu Trong Phung-who, incidentally, died of opium addiction a little younger, but far more spaced out, than when Marie Antoinette met Madame La Guillotine.