KVT’s Southern Journals

Has the locus of Vietnamese contemporary art shifted from Hanoi to HCMC?
KVT headed south to take a look for himself. The result is a series of articles about his encounters.

Read more articles here.

PART ONE @ QUYNH

Has the locus of Vietnamese contemporary art shifted from Hanoi to TP HCM? For some time I’ve been wanting to casually investigate this question  that periodically raises its head in Hanoi, especially since some of our prestigious and also more experimental art spaces have closed their doors. So when the cold weather hit hard, I booked a really cheap flight on one of our burgeoning alternative airlines and landed at Tan Son Nhat Airport on a warm, 2^nd January evening.

After a night at a pre booked hotel that turned out to be a place that rented out rooms on very short term rates to fashionably  suited men and slim young women and that smelled too powerfully of artificial peaches, I wandered down the street, unloaded my gear into a bedroom  at another more salubrious hostelerie for four days and then wandered a few blocks further down to my first destination, Galerie Quynh.

Galerie Quynh has been a premier art name in TPHCM for about nine years and at its present address for the past four.

At first glance as you walk along De Tham Street with its crowded and bustling market atmosphere, you think you must have got the address wrong

but when you enter through the glass door at number 65, you are in a quiet and cool oasis of contemporary art. Downstairs, past reception is a white space showing a few selections from Quynh’s climate controlled storeroom that houses an enviable collection from the stable of artists it represents.

Then it was upstairs to the main, l shaped exhibition space, smaller than I thought it would be, and a talk with the Associate Director, Lisa Boulet, who was once a welcoming employee of Hanoi’s Art Vietnam Gallery.

At  present Quynh  is in the throes of expanding and a new gallery will open in a more central and fashionable down town area for exhibitions of  commercial art while the present location will be for emerging artists, for installations and  more experimental work, which most cities, no matter where they, desperately need.

The exhibition up and running during my visit was ‘Concealed-Altered Icons’ and was of the high intellectual standard that you’d expect from a gallery with an international reputation like Quyen has.

I was specifically there to see the three canvasses that one of my very favorite artists, Ha Manh Thang had sent down from Hanoi. I’d been following the development of his ‘Vietnamese Landscape’ series for some time  was pleased to that my oohs, aahs and long moments of awed contemplation in his studio were repeated when I came face to face with them in a real gallery. One had sold and the largest had expressions of interest and I understand that Quynh has arranged a solo exhibition for his work later this year

I won’t expand on Thang’s works as I plan to do a larger opinion piece about him and these wonderful architectural landscapes set in Hanoi, Hueand TPHCM, in the future.

Some almost passable images from my camera :

I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the two photo-collages by Hoang Duong Cam from his series of altered photographs of ‘someone who may have affected my life before they began their careers’. The print featuring Lenin as a young man with his visage merging with the artist’s is exceptional and the one of Vietnamese national treasure, pianist Dang Thai Son I featured prominently in a post last week. (my image again)

The face of Thich Quang Duc, as in his official monument, is exquisitely carved into the head of the most popular brand of American baseball bat and is a fitting tribute to the monk who self immolated in 1963 as a protest against the repression of Buddhism by the American backed Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. It’s called ‘Enemy’s Enemy’ by Tuan Andrew Nguyen whose work I love to see more of

Lien Truong has two small works that effectively examine why so many of us need to relate to and iconize fictional heroes from popular culture,. Truong paints the heroes on supernatural landscapes and imposes her own skin color on them. Generally her series is all about the general populaces’ anxiety regarding the inescapability of death which, she believes, leads individuals to dream of these heroes or icons.

Finally there was the work of Truc Anh which suggests that icons as public figures often reveal a fabricated personality to their adoring fans (and detractors) while, all the while, concealing a private one….but then don’t most of us !? Identities in the works in charcoal are Batman, David Bowie and Dominique Strauss- Kahn

The show at Quynh, having the finishing touches put to it as I tap out this piece will feature three large installations by ex Hanoian and now TPCHMinhian, Nguyen Manh Hung, whose brilliant diorama installation shown in Hanoi at Goethe in 2011 is now a feature of the 7^th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia. This exhibition should unmissable and is the main reason I’ll book another cheap ticket to Saigon after Tet to catch it before it closes on the 28^th ( Hung’s show and the northern cold will be competing factors)

At the end of my visit to Quynh and my talk with Lisa my investigations into that QUESTION were a little further advanced especially in the realization that the death in Hanoi of three of our major art spaces in the past year had certainly left a vacuum… and it was really nice, once more, to get my feet and head into a Vietnamese gallery that had panache, curatorial expertise and a lot of savvy

I left with some excellent leads that I followed up and which, for those interested, become focal points in future issues of my southern journals

I wish I could link here to the press release of the exhibition. A great example for galleries to follow. Readable and with a nice lack of ‘art speak’ for us lesser mortals.