KVT – Lording it up with the Barons + Baroness

Hooray, hooray! The first exhibition of art I caught and that opened to the public in 2012 is a real whopper (in the remarkable sense not the fast food abomination usage) and I hope that it’s a promise of stuff to come.

12 youthful and/or youthfully provocative artists have set up an audacious exhibition at 16 Ngo Quyen. They’ve taken the bit between the teeth and seem to have issued a challenge to the local golden A+ set, those extremely rich, extremely powerful extremely glitteratti and celebrity garnering beings who supposedly have disposable income dripping like warm honey from their fingernails.

The artists premise seems to be that very few of the Golden Set invest their hard earned wealth in either buying Vietnamese fine art or mentoring its development. They apparently point out that in other economically developing countries, like China and India, the ongoing, surging and healthy contemporary art scene is buoyantly supported by many philanthropic members of the wealthy class who have a taste for the cultural finer thing in life (which is a truism). However, they seem to be suggesting that this ideal is not pervasive in Vietnam.

A person not conversant with local personalities would enter the exhibition and really enjoy it for it’s vitality, though they’d quickly realize that there seems to be a lot of friviolity and comment emanating from the canvasses. Locals might giggle or laugh themselves silly.

My particularly favorite work (though it’s really difficult to have a favorite amongst so much good stuff) is a portait in a pull out drawer in a cabinet, by Nguyen Hong Phuong, called ‘Inside Outside’

“Logic’ by Nguyen Minh Mam is another beauty in a field of canvasses that are all standouts and A+ in their own right.

I immediately related to Trieu Tuan Long’s girl on a swing.

Long has delightfully referenced Fragonard’s ‘The Happy Accident on the Swing’ from the late 18th century Rococo period in France that portrayed a world of artificiality and make-believe and game playing by the arstocracy and empahasized their unreflective and indulgent lifestyles, in particular at the Palace of Versaille. In Long’s painting it seems that the erotic voyeurism – evidenced by Fragonard by the noble reposing on the grass – is replaced by making us, the adoring viewers, the fawning voyeurs. Delicious stuff!

Ha Manh Thang’s very popular and satirical Bride and Groom series seems to have been wonderfully referenced in this canvas (artist’s name mislaid).

Congratulations to the 12 artists:Tran Dinh Binh, Nguyen Thuy Duong, Do Hiep, Nguyen Xuan Hoang, Nguyen Van Ho, Trieu Tuan Long, Nguyen Minh Nam, Nguyen Duc Phuong, Nguyen Hong Phuong, Pham Tuan Tu, Nguyen Thanh Tung, Nguyen Dinh Vu and may you, like some of your contemporary Chinese colleagues, become – thanks to sales of your art work – philanthropic Vietnamese Barons of the future.

A MUST SEE SHOW and on until February 4th.