KVT visits Tadioto

Probably the most intriguing exhibition for some time is on at Tadioto,

a trendy and well designed new gallery at 113 Trieu Viet Vuong. Even if art is not your thing Tadioto is worth visiting just to see how well a narrow, uninspiring tunnel house can be converted into a stunner. If you can, try and get up to the top floor which is the headquarters of the Dong Son Today Foundation. If you’ve got a bone of designer envy in you you’ll salivate over the long, rough tables there.

Downstairs there’s a really trendy little bar. A sort of sophisticated looking place with an air of lets be sophisticatedly naughty about it. It makes you want to go back late at night and mellow out.

In one gallery on the second floor there’s the aggressively satirical work of Nguyen Van Cuong. On the wall are two voyeuristically challenging pop art type paintings (challenging for Vietnam) that seem to ask it’s about time for a change, Isn’t it? It’s the symbolic drawings on the vessels standing along a shelf that demand and deserve lots of viewer time. They speak of power, corruption, sexism, racism plus a few other isms. Of all the young artists poking their tongues out at modern society Cuong is perhaps the most in your face. He’s been exploring the concept for some years now and the developing results are exciting and make you laugh out loud and at the same time leave you with a bit of an empty pit at the bottom of your stomach. To say the work is uniquely Vietnamese in focus misses the finger pointing at globalized greed, power and corruption that stigmatizes the innocent and the powerless. Fabulous stuff.Han Nguyen, born 1958, has some of his photographic work on show from his series Dusk. His work series Gestures is critically acclaimed in the US and if you manage to see an installation of these sepia toned body self images they’ll leave you wanting more. At Tadioto this time we get a small taste of what I hope is in store for us in the future.

It was the installation by Thai Bui (1968) that drew me to the gallery initially. The promo shows an installation of his landmines from a San Francisco exhibition and at first it was a bit disappointing to see the mini scale of work on show here….but only for a moment. The pieces have been beautifully installed and it’s worth any artist going to visit just for the visual aspect of that. The installation is titled Don’t Pressure Me and is an ongoing series begun in 1999. The medium used is rubber from inner tubes that is wrapped around it self or a natural element until it is a tight ball with the valve or stem still prominent as if asking for air to be added so that life can get back a sense of normality. The small balls, some resembling teeny bombs are mounted along a wall in haiku format I guess to accentuate the subtlety and depth of the artists intent.  And they are certainly poetically sad pieces longing for a simple formula. The pieces on the floor appear to be testicles being squeezed from their sacks and this imagery, if I’m correct, fits in well with the artist’s theme of being an individual pressured from too many sides, a feeling that must haunt so many Vietnamese in overseas diasporas. I missed the opening night video about the artist but once I got onto the powerful undertones in the work I was probably glad I could read the exhibition my own way.

Three very good artists presenting a thoughtful show for the thinking public. I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

But I’m really sorry I missed the latest at Nha San Duc which by all accounts was another thoughtful show. But that’s the problem with living in Hanoi, having prior arrangements you can’t scrub and realizing that the exhibitions at NSD are usually only valid for one night…..but them’s the breaks!

Tadioto…..I’ve been told it translates as: we go by car