KVT has boundless praise for ‘Limits'

The Sky’s the Limit for Kiên

At last!!!

I walked into VAC in Yet Kieu this morning and was completely bowled over, knocked for a six, looped the loop (and whatever other idiomatic expressions my native English speaking colleagues use to express joyful surprise).

The red and white installation Limits by Doãn Hoàng Kiên is really exciting… 
… in fact one of the last times I felt so vibrant when looking at an art installation was in Paris in 2000 when  I accidentally bumped into the very grand and colorful installation City of Games by Greek artist, Vassiliki at Place de la Bastille. Coincidentally she was the same age then as Kiên is now.

The sight of Kiên’s bamboo poles didn’t fill me with awe, more of an electric eye light up.

Vassiliki’s work was so brilliant that it demanded lots of visits and Kiên’s insists on a few too. Now I know I’m supposed to be emotionally affected by the meanings and angsts inherent in the overall work but all I want to be is part of those wonderful red and white bamboo constructions- to wander through them, around and under them. I want more. Vassiliki’s was so fabulous that a Greek musician wrote a very beautiful score to play through it and Kiên’s calls for the same. Hers was static a well as kinetic. I wondered at a future extension of his could be a barrier of pieces hanging like a forest of wind chimes.

I’ll go back and see his paintings later and digest their emotional impact and silent screams but for now I wish they were in another room so that my eyes wandering through the chaos or the symmetry of the barrier poles were not continually arrested by them…..though I guess that’s the idea anyway. I refused to even enter into Vassiliki’s intent until a third viewing, and the same with Kien’s…..like a kid, I want to play through them first.

Funny though how other visitors somehow were ignoring the barriers completely as if they were not really part of the painting exhibition they’d come to see. They’d side step, contort around bits, peer in annoyance through bits. I guess that’s what Kien intended as well.

I wonder if being a circus performer has influenced the airy, trapezey feel to parts and the: I’m in cage, let me out! feel to others.

Thank’s Kiên, my faith in art in Hanoi in the year of the buffalo is now riding as high as the ridge pole in a circus tent…..and congratulations on the first must see exhibition of the year

Parent’s, take your kids along.