KVT – Black as Black as Black as Black
KVT is glad that black is in at the Viet Art Center
I just knew it was going to be good! And it definitely is! Really worth seeing!
Project Black is showing work of six artists it has funded to do a body of work in the past year or two. Each artist has featured in a documentary and in October the docos and involved art work will go to Taiwan where gallerist and film maker Wei will exhibit them.
There are four more artists being documented to complete the project that has also included associated input by musicians and performance artists.
The project has had a good following amongst a group of artists and interested viewers but has nowhere got the publicity or audience that I think it deserves.
At the Viet Art Center in Yiet Kieu for the rest of this week, the group exhibition …in a somewhat and perhaps appropriate grunge or Goth atmosphere…. works well and has been curated very nicely. In this opinion piece I’ll throw my interpretations around like black confetti.
The artists ask you to take onboard a provocative exhibition statement and they have to present the goods if they are to live up to it.
Tran Chi Thanh certainly does. His series about the planned extinctions of endangered animals in Vietnam is really stunning and definitely a crowd puller in any gallery.
Thanh often uses the woven mat (chieu) with the Chinese symbols for double happiness painted on it as a feature of his work. Such mats are used to cover dead bodies and Thanh, who grew up in Quang Tri Province in the DMZ zone, has vivid childhood memories of kids from around his home who were killed by unexploded ordinances having their immature bodies covered by a chieu. Thus the mat recurs in his Black series as a sign of respect for animals stupidly killed for the wilfully rich who think a scrape of rhino horn will cure cancer or that a bit of tiger penis will make them more potent.
Thanh works in acrylics and has had previous canvasses hung in Biennales in Beijing and Santos in Portugal
I can’t understand why an organization like the World Wild Life Fund or NGOs who work in the endangered animal field haven’t snapped him and his up as their poster boy.
His paintings speak more eloquently any photograph could.
…yes, I agree to an extent that images on show would like to “provoke”, so do the artists… who seem to think that just slotting themselves and their work under the label of “controversy” will send the crowds and the dealers running to their show…
In fact there is little or nothing provocative in their ideas…
I found no such a thing in neither work on show.
…and yes… one can take up an issue in general with the naive and immature way of portraying femina by the young generation of Vietnamese artists…it betrays an inner insecurity and translates into a shallow thought… examples of that in the show…
…also, one can take up an issue with the emotionally empty titillating decorations depicting drug use…
as you say: “…nicely downplaying the sordid underbelly that its reality.”
… and yes, this artists do have a problem and it’s not “controversy”, it is their thinking…
Although I appreciate work which does not attempt to imitate LCD (lowest common denominator) icons of Vietnamese kitsch – examples of which abound in almost every commercial gallery in Hanoi – the work in the Black on Black show is simply unsuccessful. Not persuasive, not communicative, not seductive or expressive in any artistic sense. The works are flat and lack any reference to current or past artistic sensibilities.
Local artists may well benefit from more stringent critiques to challenge their artistic development.