KVT – The Eyes Have It

Youngish, late twentyish, artist Thuy Duong (who graduated from the University of  Fine Arts in 2006) has lots and lots of eyes staring from her work at Maison des Arts.

It’s a fairly athletic group of canvasses linked together by those eyes which the catalogue says represent The Other Eye, which I am presuming may reference the Third Eye that has a powerful meaning in so many spiritual and religious beliefs, and so strongly features in Buddhist and Taoist spirituality and meditation. In Taoist philosophy, I understand (or perhaps I don’t) that once the eye is opened in the individual it can cause insanity if it is not understood, accepted or developed correctly.


I’m probably on the wrong tack about it all but, as I felt pretty energized sitting amongst the stares, cogitating about various theories, I decided they were worth a blog post.

The canvasses are figurative and have a certain naive or primitive quality about them and a distinctly fauvist streak dancing through in their use of intensely vivid, non naturalistic and exuberant color. In fact, you could throw at them the same criticism used by viewers in early 20th-century Europe when they encountered the work of the wild beasts of fauvism, that they seem crude and untamed.

To add to the exuberance, paint seems to have been emotionally slashed and troweled onto the canvasses and wild daubs and splodges used as emphasis.

For me they have a good, even aggressive, feminist appeal to them….but that may be my wishful thinking, and the prancing and posturing may be no more than a young artist’s experiments with movement and color. I’d rather perceive some as caged beasts raging around their unnatural enclosures, determined to escape and discover a type of freedom.

More than the paintings I enjoyed the youthful swirl and energy that permeates the gallery.

As usual, my apologies to the artist if, as is so often the case, I’ve been too fanciful.