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”Love” Exhibition by Nguyen Quang Huy

Posted on 11/01/2011

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Love: Portraits, Landscapes, Video, and Light Sculpture
Opening: Fri 14 Jan, 6 -8 pm
Exhibition: 14 Jan – 12 Feb 2011
Art Vietnam

From Art Vietnam:
Nguyen Quang Huy titles this exhibition of twenty-five portraits simply “Love,” and in this appearance at Art Vietnam Gallery Huy explores the Hmong people in the mountainous province of Ha Giang. Huy has traveled in this northern region of Vietnam for the past fifteen years and met many of the Hmong who live there, and it is from them Huy derives inspiration for the work he now offers us.

Huy seeks this natural, free instinct-an instinct that is free, too, of the influences of any outside culture-in these works. They include, apart from the portraits, several landscapes, a video depicting the special grace and ease of Hmong movement, and several neon sculptures. In all of them we witness Huy’s endeavor to discover what he is and what he is not. It is a fight with himself, reflecting the history of his time; it is a struggle, we may also say, with the urge to make a life of simplicity and clarity, shorn of all external influence and interference.

Huy’s method in the portraits is an expression of the honesty he reaches to achieve. He begins with photographs-usually the first any Hmong has ever had taken. It is the fresh, exciting emotion in these images that Huy transfers to the painted works. And he has hung them for us in a manner resembling the road to Ha Giang, as depicted in his video: The faces are always connected by way of a simple honesty.