Ilza Burchett – The Blinded Realism of Le Quang Ha

Attending Le Quang Ha’s exhibition at 8 Gallery in HCMC, is a head on collision with his visions of a world where the vulgarity of the grotesque, brutal monstrosity and terror sit on the pedestal of blind rage and where love, tenderness, poetry and beauty — if not entirely abolished — are marked by sorrow, yet are allowed the hope of breaking the curse of a nightmarish dream and finding their way to the promise of non-judgmental freedom.
The density in the presentation of the works in this exhibition underlines the extraordinary intensity of Le Quang Ha’s imagery.

Placed closely together these masterfully executed works do not permit a pose, but demand an equally intense attention and scrutiny back from the viewer.

One has to get close and personal, or one has to leave without looking.

Mesmerizing, if repulsive in their from-a horror movie-like appearance, his invented metaphorical personages are ghostly, vampire-like, amorphous, near sex-less creatures with fancy shoes and gaping mouths screaming in rage and terror.

There are also those uniformly clad cyborgs with interconnecting protrusions, chattering teeth and zipped jaws, accompanied by saliva spewing dogs, ready as ever to snap up — all additionally deformed by exaggerated foreshortenings in their anatomical depiction — confronting point blank or looming at the viewer with their outstretched enormous paws and ghastly apparatuses.

These paintings are composed in a symbolic way, where the space is oppressively open-ended and meaningless or confined by closed, cage-like imaginary outline of perspective.

This view of the world producing and reproducing the monstrosity of its grotesque corrupting power- games of domination and subjugation of thought and individuality with its surreally frightening connotations of one being doomed to it, bites with its zipped halfway gnashing teeth into the reality of the artist’s existence and affects his creative drive.

The mechanized and ghost-like demons Le Quang Ha’s art is besieged by, are suggestive of the artist’s frustrations with the world of conformity, imposition of sameness and corruption of thought he portrays in his works — in that world headless chickens fly, only to be outdone by one with a human head coming out of a shark’s toothy snout.

It’s a corny and rough satirical metaphor, like all the metaphors, populating the blinded world the artist depicts.

Le Quang Ha’s satire builds up into a culmination of terror in his sculpture “Grinder Meat’, which is literal in thought and symbolism.

The same image is repeated in his painting ‘Mona Lisa’, in which the pointy ears of his monsters are transferred onto the sardonically smiling at the viewer historical cultural icon of all times; condemning her classicism and universal ideal of beauty as a laboratory experiment of production of menacing cliches.

This aesthetic stance is furthered in the other two sculptures on show: ‘”Venus” Reclining’ and ‘Venus’.
Le Quang Ha’s ‘”Venus” Reclining” is as amorphous and as blobby as his screaming monsters. Her headless and limbless torso is trashy shining silver.

Here it is for us to view and contemplate the old fat woman’s piece-of-meat-torso as a sarcastic replacement and an answer to the concept of classical sensual beauty. However, his “Venus” presents yet another version — no less sarcastically erect in its newly minted grotesque cyborg appearance.

It is hard to understand this re-conceptualization of the idea of beauty as an ideal.

Is this aesthetic stance an outright rejection or a critique of the corruption of the classical ideals of beauty and its symbols as universally accepted signs?

Perhaps the artist stakes his vision on the comparison with the only two untainted images in the whole exhibition, both named ‘Baby Girl’, which are untouched by the corrupting forces of the world the artist is pitching himself against on his path through his “Blinded Realism”.

These images of a symbolically caged, and then, of a reaching out to the viewer vulnerably naked child-like tearjerker reality is his own inner reality of love and sorrow for the world of no matter how hard and painful, but beautiful and pure human feelings.

Le Quang Ha’s “Blinded Realism” is made of art which is hard hitting in its scathing criticism of the corruption of values and ideals in modern society. 

His art is continuing on its quest for answers to the questions he asks of himself through the journey of his life.