KVT – A Welcome with a Difference at Cuci Gallery

KVT is enjoyably and thoughtfully impressed with work of five artists

There’s a refreshing group exhibition at the Cuci gallery, up the stairs above the Cine Café at the Cinemateque. Cuci, is a gallery burgeoning with entrepreneurial ideas (it was the main proponent of the Christmas art fair at the Hang Da Galleria. It is still finding its feet in the commercial art gallery circuit but I get more impressed with each show they mount in their home space

This one is called MY PLEASURE and features 5 not so well known artists in their twenties and thirties. It’s been nicely curated so that the exhibition space is not crowded or confusing..and as you’ll realize if you continue reading, clouds of butterflies are a uniting factor.

The sensation of the show is female artist Nguyen Thi Kim Nga whose paintings on silk will draw more than a few appreciative gasps

Not that it may matter to a potential buyer but the children depicted are all autistic and the theme derives from the artist’s time working with such afflicted children since 2006.

Drawing the three works together is a length of red thread, shown in two works, perhaps as an invisible entity in the cat’s cradle formed by the fingers in the third, and then depicted escaping from the formalized representations and spooling onto the floor.

The artist would have been on a real winner without adding the externals as but once you get in sync with her purpose it all fits together abstractly but nicely. If you’ve had dealings with individuals with autism you’ll reach your own sensitive conclusions about the indecipherable tumbling blocks that they face threading a path through life trying to discover where and why they do or don’t fit.

There’s more than a nod to the constructivists and Malevich and Tatlin in the installation with geometrical forms tumbling from one painting as though attempting to make sense of the whole…..By this stage some readers may be placing me in the aspergers spectrum of the autism disorder

Those butterflies are everywhere, swarming, perching on other exhibits… you almost expect them to alight on your head

They are folded up photos, oregamied, of female acquaintances of the artist Le Bao Ngoc – fellow art students that she shared time with on art camps and who became close friends

As time flew by the friendships, as friendships do, fluttered in different directions and sometimes only ephemeral memories are left.

It’s an effective installation that commences around a timetable of activities and names at an art camp. Some butterflies remain trapped inside the frame of youthful reference- or clinging to its security- perhaps unwilling to fly off into a wider, scarier world.

It’s a piece you can stay with and meditate upon for a long while.

Butterfly as a common reference to female genitals by Vietnamese males adds another dimension that could be explored

A piece of video art by one of the male artists, Pham Ngoc Ha Ninh, is very effective in small screen mode but would be sensational in its own large space

It’s about village Dinh, the traditional communal buildings that were once central to Vietnamese communities and that were officially destroyed in the not too distant past.

Apparently they have been officially pardoned and, like pagodas, are being repaired or rebuilt but their traditional and cultural significance may have skipped a generation-or this is what the artist may be implying- amongst other more inflammatory assertions.

I keep on saying that I contend that video art will soon be as common place in the house and in private art collections as are paintings. This work, with its rather beautiful changing colors, fits the bill perfectly

Ha Manh Chien carves beautiful little wooden statuettes based on the shapes of heavily pregnant women and displays them in lines on platforms and stages of yellow sand.

To some viewers the little figures resemble pot bellied business men bustling about their self important business. To others they bring to mind saffron and orange clothed monks in procession

In this installation, titled CHORUS, the little folk hang like bats, their wings folded as they rest before waking and taking their place in the unrelenting passage of life.

Another intriguing and effective piece…enfluttered, like the others, by butterflies and inveigled by autistic suppositions.

When you enter the gallery you are given the red carpet treatment……

….and this installation by Quach Bach is initially grandly welcoming, as though being received by a person of importance, even a saint.

Then the UGH factor appears when you step up close and nearly tread on real cockroaches

Then you see that cockroaches are all over…raining from that heavenly cloud, scurrying towards you along the red carpet and infesting the clothes and seemingly unconcerned face of the figure.
The artist states that he is addressing superficiality and false appearances, things that are rotten under the surface

One could expand one’s reactions into an essay of creepy and repulsive societal observations. But I leave that to the viewer who probably won’t help but feel a little unsettled particularly when remembering that the creature that is likely to survive a nuclear catastrophe is the arthropod depicted (which probably is the reason my image is out of focus)

AN EXHIBITION REALLY WORTH VISITING