KVT – SUMMER FLOWER SHOWERS

Nguyen The Hung’s exhibition at Art Vietnam is exactly apt for exactly now in Hanoi.

It’s the time when petals are falling in soft showers from flowering trees and in some places roads are confettied with deep gold, burnt orange, crimson, purple and bright yellow as the bang langs, hoa dieps, hoa phuongs and other floral canopies come to grips with the onset of deepest summer…when cicadas are starting to sing their afternoon hymns.

The exhibition, titled ‘and Flowers Showered’ is the prettiest in town, and, with its wide expanses of whites and greens, is definitely the coolest.

Now here’s where I go off on one of my tangents again so apologies to the artist if I misrepresent his intentions or am way off the mark. I’m all set to enjoy myself!

As I wandered through the second and third level gallery spaces I kept having these déjà vu feelings and as I sat soaking up all this breezy, summery atmosphere, it came to me….Aubrey Beardsley! The lovely ladies in the “When Does It Start” canvasses are beautifully redolent of Beardsley’s playful and theatrical style that was partly inspired by Greek vase painting and Japanese woodcuts. Michael Gibson in “Symbolism” says that ‘the venemous elegance of Beardsley’s drawings have an ornamental rhythm akin to the abstract decorations of Islamic palaces’. To me, Hung’s ladies have a similar elegance but a rhythm akin to Japanese woodcut erotica and Japanese screens.

All the works are on handmade Dó paper adhered to canvas and, for me, there’s a delightful Japanesey feel to the whole collection, in particular the large pieces that feature clear, open spaces with figurative details perched on or in them. At times a resonance of geisha, a suggestion of kabuki, a glimpse of manga.

And I couldn’t help thinking that there’s an aspect of theater in many of the large works…it’s as if they are waiting to be converted into backdrops for a contemporary dance or stage sets for something beautifully dramatic. And they’d be awesome!…..and hey…I wasn’t too far off the mark because as I left Art Vietnam I read that he’d done a stage design for a contemporary dance in 2007.

Some of the works have suggestions of bodies sensuously moving under folds of pale green cloth. Very choreographic!

But as the canvasses get smaller they become more detailed and I found them a bit too busy and hard to take in, preferring the coolness and looseness of their larger colleagues. It  wasn’t until I got to above the ground floor and began to waltz around with my imaginings of Japanese summers occasionally and sensuously populated with sinuous Beardsleys that I loosened up and started to enjoy it.

Throughout the works the petals continue to flutter earthwards to make ephemeral carpets. Usually the flowers contain collaged photograph images of real people. Metaphors and symbolic imagery spills from the mind as freely as the soft petals from the loaded trees and if I was a creative writing teacher I’d have a field day making my students play with word pictures or draw up lists of literary analogies and allusions. (I always think that it’s great pity that imaginative educators can’t see the opportunities that await them and their students in art galleries.)

At one stage when looking at a figure on a rounded hill, my imagination left Japan and momentarily I was with Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Petit Prince on his small planet…Now I could start to tease out that analogy but enough is enough on this sticky, early morning when a bullfrog in the garden next door is asking for my attention. He’s started to bell seductive mating calls from a pond that is almost too dazzlingly afloat with petals falling and falling from an overarching golden shower tree .

And dazzle also applies to Hung’s green tree on its gold leaf background. It’s pretty effective, strategically placed and will be admired.

On a suffocating summer’s day the exhibition is worth a visit. A cooling experience that will make the heat more whimsically bearable.

It’s a bit decorative…but there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s stagey….and I always like work that can carry that off! And it’s nicely curated and that’s always a relief.

Hung’s summer flower showers are a tonne more effective than a lot of those horrendous paintings of flower-burdened street trees that bloom in a lot of popular art places. Occasionally you come across one that makes your spirits sing and your summer soul soar but usually you just think that the weight of those blooms would suffocate you.