Ilza Burchett – Transcendance: The Legacy of Artist and Art Teacher Tran Trung Ky (1939-2014)

(Vietnamese version available – Đã có bản dịch tiếng Việt)

A retrospective solo exhibition of works of the artist and art teacher Tran Trung Ky, at Nam Dinh Museum, Nam Dinh City, has sadly become posthumous.

It is letting the viewer peer into the artist’s life through the eyes of his death.

It is opening the gates to a sincerity of a deeply intimate and profoundly emotional view of his legacy.

This exhibition is a compilation of paintings created in diverse media –oils on canvas, paintings on silk, on paper — of diverse genres and seemingly unrelated artistic styles of expression, diverse images, thoughts and emotions, non-unified, forms and colors that fix and at the same time connote remnant moments, which allow glimpses into their creator’s life and work.

Marked by the power of death, this is no longer an ordinary exhibition, but a humble, though emotionally charged tribute to the life of Tran Trung Ky — to the life of a person, an artist, a teacher.

Viewed through the mysterious prism of death, the paintings in this exhibition no longer speak only of their subject mater, the artist’s skill, or the level of his artistic attainment.

Though not unimportant, these give way to a flood of unexpected perceptions and feelings, somehow conjured up and conveyed by the imaginary spaces appearing as gaps, left by the absence of chronology in the presentation of Tran Trung Ky’s works.

This incomplete, non – linear, impressionistically fluid view of works from different periods of the artist’s life, oddly becomes a revelation.

The absence transforms itself into a palpable presence.

It makes one look and search beyond the pictures themselves.

It makes one perceptive of the character of the person, to the somehow projected feeling of natural modesty and kindness.

Tran Trung Ky’s goodness and his humanity become present, permeating the emotional space of the exhibition.

These perceptions, this newly created emotional space come across by the way of a small cluster of portraits, or his impressionistically painted land and townscapes unexpectedly juxtaposed with larger canvases imbued with symbolism, or the near abstractions of his latest works…

Perhaps most importantly, it creates the overwhelming impression that there is something more besides the actual paintings — that as much as they are a material testimony to the artist’s life and work, there is something transcending beyond and above their materiality — the ability of the artist to convey and share an emotional state of being — in a sense a true teacher of art.