KVT – Grounding a House Boat

KVT afloat with awe about a great conceptual idea

What a great idea!

You pluck a small floating houseboat (a real one) from the Red River, not far upstream from Long Bien Bridge, and you transport it on the back of a truck to the square of lawn inside the Fine Art University in Yiet Kieu and install it on a mirror platform, with comfortable, modern sofas around it for viewers to see it at ease, as casual, removed observers or even as voyeurs….. a bit like you would if you were leaning against the bridge parapet to take in the quaint scene far below.


Apparently it’s part of a conference and exhibition about the lives of people who live in the floating villages near Hanoi. 126 smallish but fascinating photographs document these floating people.

What excited me most were the photo-shopped images of the house if installed inside a plastic cube, on a mirror platform,  in a conventional, white walled art gallery. Stunning! And what a great statement it would make! Hopefully it may eventuate somewhere in the world!

Then imagine an adjoining gallery with a selection of the photos blown up huge scale…and in another a video presentation (saw one recently at a Doclab documentary showing at Goethe that would fit the bill; perfectly)

A photo-shop image I saw last week of an ideal presentation at the University had huge screens on the University walls, the boat dwarfed in front, showing the photographs in a multi screen slide show……Wow!

The artist’s documentation about the boat’s removal is well done too.

The artist, Nguyen Hong Phuong, could have a real hit on his hands with this little beauty….I hope the concept grows legs and sprints into international fame….and tell him that I’d love to meet him and offer my congratulations.

It’s a real treat to look inside the vessel and realize just how cleverly the floating ones cope.