KVT – 8 @ BUI

KVT muses on quakes and fine art

Just arrived back in Hanoi after a couple of months in warmer places and managed to catch one of the last days of the latest exhibition at the Bui…..ended on the 15th.

Past solo exhibitions by some of the eight experienced and succesful artists in this group show have made me feel the ground rumble and shake under my feet like a 6 to 8 scale quake, particularly installations in the past year or two by Le Huy Hoang, Nguyen Manh Hung, Pham Ngoc Duong, and owlish paintings by the only female representative, Ly Tran Quynh Giang.

So I approached the doors of Bui expecting a few trembles and wasn’t too disapointed. The minimalistic illusion that looks like a huge graffiti drawing of a breast feeding mother on a white brick wall (but is really a painting on canvas that has been prepared to represent a 3D facsimile of said wall) is a stunner. When you go to the second floor and catch artist Truong Tan’s second work, you see that the stylized mother image has been taken from cards used in traditional gambling game. If you’ve got an imagination like mine you visualize a gallery full of similar graffiti works using the other figures that make up the card set. Major scale art quake that would be!!

The victim of violence and persecution themed works by Nguyen Thai Tuan (from his very ominous Black Painting series) and Le Huy Hoang (from his research into and personal experience of the Cambodian killing fields) are hung in close proximity and make a powerful entry statement. Tuan’s work resonates with the clandestine terror tactics applied by most world governments (probably all!) against innocent citizens, and Hoang’s is a major instalation die-ing to jump off the wall and manifest itself in bricks and mortar.

Ly Tran Quynh Giang’s last audience-wowing solo, a year ago, featured paintings of owlish faces and in this exhibition she has carved a human baby-sized owl figure and nestled it in a box on a bed of wood shavings. Is it a a cradle or a coffin? Is Giang symbolically laying her owl series to rest? Over-shadowing the owl are two conjoined, rough and writhing carved fish skeletons, aggressive and exciting. As the fish bones are titled “It’s Coming”, you wonder if this is a premonition of a new direction in her work.

Two pieces glimmer like jewelled exclaimation points. Nguyen Manh Hung’s surrealistic painting ‘Blue Sky, White Clouds and Yellow Sun’ is one and if you saw his brilliant installation ‘Paradise’ at Goethe earlier this year you’ll be just as entranced with this beauty of a soviet-style, post-war apartment block that seem to be so silent yet, if you listen carefully, is full of the noise emitted by crowded tenements. The other gem is the delicately painted female head set in front of fertile rice fields by Nguyen Minh Thanh. He states that he is playing with the concept of mixed race identity and it works quite poignantly.

The catalogue that goes with the exhibition is well presented, if verbose, and was worth grabbing a copy of to accompany my second round of viewing.

It’s not an earth-shattering exhibition but does emit a minor tremor or two. It doesn’t allay the miasma of lethargy (or something) that seems to be hovering over the contemporary art scene in Hanoi, but allows a few startling glimpses into what may be…or could have been.

Nguyen Quang Huy’s angels that are heavily grounded though beautifully poetic could represent a metaphoric plea for local art to roar and soar like a firey dragon into the new year …and, if I may mangle another metaphore, not allow itself to be pressured into conformity and/or the stultifying realms of SAFE …as Pham Ngoc Duong so eloquently shouted at us this time last year through his terrifying Transformer and squads of squashed students.

Of course, major obstacles facing lots of promising artists are not those of motivation or innovation, but those of lack of sponsorship and financial mentorship.