KVT – Lots to Enjoy Nowadays

At the same time she appears to be commenting on the fate of upper class women in traditional Vietnamese society where, perhaps, they were often seen as accessories to male power and had empty roles to play and the same face to put on regardless of inner emotions. Returning to the fate of the fashion mannequin, the face she has to choose for the catwalk is remarkably devoid of choice. Perhaps the artist is referring to the prostitution of the soul that is either forced upon women or, amazingly, sometimes chosen by them.

Enough of my perhaps!

Just past the mannequins are two of Le Minh Tan’s ‘Hot Girls’. These seemingly liberated hotties ( I hope I’m correct with the adjective!) parade around bra-less proudly exhibiting pendulous breasts, unashamedly, gorgeously. The flat, almost pasteled, thin painting style works a treat and one hot girl is definitely the real star of the exhibition. She gets lots of audience attention and her faked demureness will surely impress a savvy collector who’ll snap her up.

I wasn’t as much taken in by the candy abstracted hot girls on the opposite wall

Nguyen Duc Hung led us into the surreal with his elaborate females with exotically constructed spines or appendages and garlanded with roses and , in one case, seemingly in a graveyard of roses. The symbolism comes fast and furious and my mind whirls with tales and whys and perhaps-es that I could twirl around them. They are so full and complex that I’ll need a second visit to really appreciate them. As they hang directly across from the seemingly simplistically constructed super real works by Trinh Minh Tien, it is too easy to dismiss them as too hard to digest.

As I stated in my opening sentence, it’s worth a visit