KVT – Lots to Enjoy Nowadays
KVT up on level three
Its worth visiting the exhibition by six artists at the Art Talk Café. The exhibition can be reached through the inviting looking café and progressing up through some very interesting spaces to the third floor. It’s also worth while progressing down a different set of stairs and viewing the Mai Gallery permanent collection.
Called ‘Nowadays’, its one of those group collaborations that might pack a bit of a punch for a lot of viewers.
I’m now going to enjoy myself scattering ideas and confused interpretations around willy- nilly like demented confetti
Hyper realist Trinh Minh Tien shows us how clever he can be with a reflecting Porsche that looks as though its owner employs a permanent cloth wielding cleaner. Some clever viewers may even be able to recognize its parking location by piecing together the fractured reflections.
The same artist’s drawn portraits are deft and attention grabbing with every follicle given considerable care and the face a very good character study. But it his smallest piece that I like the most and, I think, is one of the best canvasses in the whole show. His street vendor’s table , crowded with the usual array, was quirky enough and just less polished enough to really grab me and it would look very proud on one of my wall spaces at home.
A year or so ago, in a young artists’ competition at the University of Fine Arts , Pham Tuan Tu showed some of delightfully wicked and delightfully more-ish transvestite figures in gothically mysterious and enticing situations. In this show he keeps to sexually ambivalent, older male characters in traditional dress (and makeup). Wonderful work with wonderful titles like “Love Hanoi So Much’, ‘Through the Buddhist Gate’ and ‘Nothing is Nothing’. The sinuous nose hairs are striking. The implied commentary is probably very wicked too. Nicely presented and worth asking the price.
Le Chi Hieu has a fair few canvasses in show and its his littlest that have a bit of collectable flair, particularly his ‘Soldiers Game’ trio. You can look at Hieu’s work and see bits and pieces and ideas and props appropriated from some of his successful artistic colleagues. On a good day, Hieu can be an effective satirist using his primitif approach and in these small bits he’s having a lot of fun and said artists will probably laugh along with him. I had a few giggles too.
The three Mannequin canvasses by Nguyen Khai Chinh are starkly glamorous, perhaps making comment on the vacuous personas adopted by fashion models…not to mention their aching feet, rumbling tummies and a desperate looking into a future where old is too awful to contemplate.
