KVT – Black as Black as Black as Black
Nguyen Thanh Son is really dismayed about the cult of the soldier hero that obviates the pain and suffering that is carried by ex soldiers and their families…not to mention the slaughtered and maimed innocents that are put aside as collateral damage . His canvasses have a dour and primitif feel to them that really pushes their message to the fore. As with the other work on show, Son’s paintings have universal reference and appeal.
Ex user, Hoang Xuan Huong has a series of stylistic, hard edged, acrylic works that successfully appropriate and extend a style successful in developed countries and has its roots in graphic design. His canvasses that graphically, almost impersonally, depict users shooting up have a fashion spread feel to them that is really nice and perhaps ironically references the glamor that the cult of celebrity adds to the drug scene- sexualizing it while nicely downplaying the sordid underbelly that its reality.
Tan Minh Nguyen has a very powerful series of work on large unstretched canvas. He comes from the realms of the surreal, as do so many Vietnamese artists. I like the way in which he suggests that there is hope at the far end of the tunnel.
Tan, like some other artists pushes to topple artificial strictures that force people to conform. His characters, pushing out of their rigid boundaries, are overwhelmingly female and, to my mind, Tan is addressing the male constructs built around females that imprison them, physically, mentally and sexually, in subservient spaces. I’d love to read a strong feminist appraisal of the pieces, one of which has been in a Beijing biennale.
I can’t recommend the exhibition highly enough, even if it is a bit uneven in places.
It has the right touch of thoughtful provocativeness that makes it really edgy and worth while talking about….If I was a book club I’d ring up all of the members to go and read the stories on the canvasses. You’d end up with a discussion to outdo all discussions.
Ends this Saturday ….so best to rush it!
By now the pall of tobacco smoke that hung like a thick shroud on opening night and that had all non smokers worried about their passive intake, will have evaporated, leaving behind just a whiff of smellorama that you’ll probably think is effective.
| Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below. |
…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.