KVT – Frontier Area

KVT revists some favorite mountain places

Oh, no, say a few readers, not another opinion piece loaded with recollections!

Sorry, say I, but I just can’t get my fingers to stop!

I’m a frontier type person. In my travels throughout Vietnam since 1998 I’ve been drawn towards the borders in search of adventure and the unusual and exotic. Usually I get turned back and once got collected and held for ransom. Once we found ourselves a few hours up slopes in China and hightailed it back quick smart.

So when I saw that the new Nguyen Art Gallery in Van Mieu had a ‘Frontier Area’ exhibition up and running I couldn’t resist a visit. When I read artist Mai Huy Dung’s first paragraph about his work I was fairly well hooked.

‘I am a wanderer. When I feel tired of the whirl of modern life I take my backpack to escape away, sometimes with friends, sometimes by myself…….I don’t know when it starts but just seeing the sign FRONTIER AREA, I always feel very excited’

Me too!

Dung’s largish portraits on canvas are of the ethnic people who live hard lives in the northern mountain border regions, eking a living from the hardest of hard soil and although some of the portraits don’t pass go, some are really, really nice and, for people like me who spend long hours on mountain trails or sitting on a rocky vantage point as the people pass by, or work, very evocative.

Dung is far, far luckier than me because he’s Vietnamese and can wander at will and probably not be noticed too much. I stand out like a sore toe and have to pretend that I’m invisible to these people who often don’t speak Vietnamese.

Some viewers will love the sweeping gestural swathes and strokes of oil paint applied like luscious colored butter. Some will stand back and call the work a bit too fauve….but I can assure them that if you’ve ever spent those long times over the years sitting for late afternoon hours on a boulder that almost soars into empty space above high rocky chasms that fall away into China, watching the Meo return from their fields, way, way down, the colors reflecting from the deep grayish green rocks that cover every slope like dragon scales, often hues the world as Dung indicates.

I guess some will call the work a bit ‘touristy’. Some of the works do fit that category but most, I’m sure, are completely honest attempts to capture the people and landscapes that Dung seems to, and I definitely, like and yearn for, most in Vietnam. So for me it’s a show tinged with memories that photographs can never hold.

I’ll let others critique Dung’s canvasses. For me it was enough for me to sit on an imaginary rock and enjoy their parade.

Its hanging in Van Mieu until November 25.