KVT – Thai Bui Exhibition at Tadioto Gallery

KVT at Tadioto – A personal interpretation of a good exhibition…. with apologies to the artist.
A visit to the latest exhibition at the Tadioto Gallery is a scintillatingly painful experience in an exquisitely painless way.
This is Thai Bui’s second exhibition there (he co-opened the gallery a couple of years ago with rather intriguing, visual haikus of compressed agony). He’s lived in the US since he was 21 (emigrating after the American War).

Stones tightly enclosed in pieces of rubber inner tubes from car tires with the valve, or stem, still a prominent feature, and suspended in groups from the ceiling, reference his earlier exhibition, Don’t Pressure Me.

Here’s where the inferred pain comes into play. As in the last exhibition most hanging pieces resemble testicles compressed tightly in stretched scrotums with the valve stems straining to let loose explosions of monumental proportions and the viewer may cower wondering what pent up frustrations and energies are about to be released.

Sometimes the objects have dangerous looking spines and pointy shards around the heads and resemble genitalian grenades or a suicide bomber’s ingenuous way of getting even with his persecutors.

A few seem to be pierced with in-growing, spiky pubic hair….almost too painful to see.

One group is painted in precious golds and silvers perhaps to point out that even the rich fall prey to the same neuroses and pressures.

Around the small gallery are small, diasporic groupings of grey pebbles. None have left the safety of the fold, being tumbled together through the streams of experience, buffeted and smoothed by the same forces and, like so many human diasporas, preferring to remain within what ever fragile security they afford each other rather than risk individual explorations into the unknown and/or threatening. A very attractive, but conformist grouping of tan pebbles attaches massed and limpet-like to a wall.

The drawings are fascinating diversions but inversions. Spermatozoon-like figures are caught immobile between spongy, ungiving tissues or trapped in mazes of narrow, undulating canals that enforce a tepid conformity.

I really liked the two polished stones jointed together with wood. Make your own interpretations as I’ve invented enough and I’m probably way off the mark, but who cares? It’s not often I can have as much fun with images and words and still reek of sincerity.

An exhibition of substance….. and tortured masculinity. If you’re a serious art lover you should see it.