KVT – Dialogues on the Walls at Goethe

Interesting though silent dialogues are issuing from the walls of the exhibition hall at the Goethe Institute and although the dialogues are dominated by male voices it’s still an interesting space to be in

Two Vietnamese women and six Vietnamese men have included a Vietnamized Armenian in their exhibition of some recent works. The artists’ birthdates are spread over 3 decades – the eldest is fifty six, the youngest twenty seven.

After eavesdropping for a time I came away with my personal translations and vignettes that may not have anything much in common with what individual artists intend… but I’ve sure had fun inserting my own monologues.

Two artists dialogue about the rapidly accelerating changes that are divorcing new generations from centuries old customs and traditional cultural beliefs, stories and icons

Nguyen Dinh Vu (born 1980, male) has two works that immediately grab people like me who are besotted with Vietnamese blue and white ceramics. He has as hero the modern, upwardly mobile, technologically savvy male, his head encased in the blinkered neoliberal universe of ‘capitalism at all costs, as soon as possible, regardless of any consequences.’

In one work he has his protagonist framed by heavenly phoenix in the guise of peacocks – activating personal fame and luck, getting heaps of public admiration from everyone who matters

In another he is beset by the spirit of the tiger – full of life and drive and progress inciting awe and admiration from all for his nonchalant trampling over a fragile earth

Trang Hoang Hai Yen (1979, female) gives us a parable featuring a Tien Nu – whom she translates as Andromeda – to discuss that contemporary place where the bewildered stand reaching backwards with one hand for the succor of the old and known but straining impatiently for the glitter that the promised land is reportedly smothered in.

Tien Nu were mythological Vietnamese sky nymphs who sometimes grew tired of heavenly realms and came to earth. Often mortal men fell in love with them and vice versa causing the wrath and vengeance of the Sky God to break forth and to punish the offending nymph.

Andromeda was the unfortunate Greek island girl whose mother boasted that she was more beautiful than the sea nymphs and their father, the Sea God punished the mother by having the hapless girl chained to a cliff above the sea and allowing a sea monster to ravage and devour her

There is a point of coalescence between Andromeda and our unfortunate Tien Nu who is being devoured by female pigs with the head of the god of greed slavering above that Vietnamese viewers will realize – that is if they are still conversant with their creation stories and folk tales.

Some viewers may see regurgitations from Golding’s Lord of the Flies seeping around and will hope that our Tien Nu, like Andromeda and Ralph from the novel, will be rescued and their devouring monster or nightmare, dispatched.

The gods – and those that aim to be gods – who caused their distress will continue to seek revenge for as long as we revere or fear them.

In her inimitable and cheeky way Le Thi Minh Tam (1976, female), as if to thumb her nose at traditional mores and the conservative gods with censorial habits, gives us two nude representations of a nymph named Tara, one in lacquer and one on silk.

Nguyen Dinh Duy Quyen (1987, male) jumps in and states in his surreal manner that nothing from the past or anything in the future matters much at all if we don’t all grab our brains and start doing something extra-ordinarily quick smart about cutting down carbon emissions. It won’t be our children’s children’s children who’ll be spitting chips and cursing us careless and licentiously short sighted inhabitants of planet earth

It’ll be the present MilLennial’s children!

Tran Gia Tung (1970, male) tells of late, summer afternoons in the alleys near Long Bien Bridge. Crimson sun illuminating the Flamboyant Poincianas like flowing lava. Hot enough to sear the brain!

Dinh Quan (1964, male) takes us into lacquered winter. Pure gold dancing across somber grey. Perhaps his luscious abstraction is of skeletons of dried lotus slowly disintegrating into sludge… offering precious hope of resurrection.

Or are they elegantly dancing sibyls prophesying the fate of planet earth

Armenian Armen Gevorgyian (1960, male) uses a trinity of pastels on paper perhaps to suggest that we should listen to what the ailing natural world is trying to say

Trinh Minh Tien (1983, male) has a naked, vulnerable figure transversing a dreamlike landscape that is being subsumed in white. The artist perhaps suggests that attaining a state of tranquility in and with nature will enable humankind to discover solutions to what is ailing it (nature and humankind)

I am reminded of times when I’m on remote mountain roads in winter sun. Below, valleys are swaddled in white clouds tinged in grey. My instinctive desire is to wander down through the white layers towards new adventures and discoveries.

Mostly I just perch on the precipice for a moment of wonder, preferring to stay safe in the sun and the known.

Along pops an effervescent Nguyen Van Duy (1989, male) and with a hyperactive, youthful bubbliness bounces up and down all over conventions and symbolisms and attempts to persuade us to get off our meditating or despairing bums, stop being thought controlled puppets and get the ball rolling before it’s far too late.

THE DIALOGUES CEASE ON THE 29th