KVT – Two Outstanding Artists and a Downtown Meeting Point

L’Espace is hosting some work of two major artists-one Vietnamese, the other French.

Tran Trong Vu is fifty two, born in Hanoi but a Parisienne since the late 1980ies. He’s been on an international trajectory for years and in 2012 in New York was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krazner award for established artists… a winner of whom Jackson and Lee would most decidedly have approved.

Christine Jean (a video of her recent work here:

[youtube width=”700″ height=”393″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhNtTN5t9ac[/youtube]

and a profile here) is an extremely respected French artist who visited Vietnam, exhibiting and working with up and coming Vietnamese artists, in 1994 and 1997. She received an art award named after another famous artist, Jean Francoise Millet-and after exploring her works you’d probably recognize the connections between the two.

Their exhibition at L’Espace is titled Meeting Point and in it the two artists appear to have agreed to use flowers as one immediately apparent medium in their silent conversations.

As happens often in these climes, after downing a heady cocktail full of implications this opinionista is left limping due to too many oblique contortions.

Christine Jean has her installation bracketed by two large canvasses of lotus plants in their autumnal period of decay and submersion into the mud from which they sprouted.

The pink lotus, in bud, is Vietnam’s national flower; it’s a symbol of divine beauty; of the elegance and purity and exquisiteness of young females; it is quoted as being a commitment to an optimistic future.

‘In the pond, nothing’s more beautiful than lotus, the flower of the dawn’

As in a lot of paintings about lotus ponds at the end of their lifecycle in often putrid mud, I find Jean’s large canvasses extremely beautiful and, probably necessarily, a soupçon pessimistic.

Could beauty and hope could ever resurrect out of such desolation? Though if I take the rhetorical idiomatic stance about glasses being half full or half empty then I can well assume that the artist’s two visual statements about physical corruption parenthesize strongly held universal feminist concerns and beliefs – that also need to be addressed in the local arena.

The smaller canvasses are arranged in an unexpected, non conforming pattern.

Each small work has a figurative female image apparently emerging from sludgy chaos and muddy maelstrom – perhaps poetically through historical expectations and conservative dictates.

The images seem to portray females in guises ranging from the historical to the contemporary and others have visages that appear to be slipping back into or emerging from the slime (take your half glass full pick).

The allusions within Jean’s work are powerful

One central figure appears to be a recognition statement as Christine Jean stares through a curtain of flowers that appear to belong to an iconic installation by Tran Trong Vu

…in this installation DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE HAPPY

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/63001510[/vimeo]

Or another, chilling scenario:

If we use the title that Tran Trong Vu gave his present installation in L’Espace – when it was conceived in Paris: WORDS THAT ARE YET TO BE SPOKEN – then perhaps another meeting point between the two artists is explained more poignantly

Tran Trong Vu has utilized some familiar motifs of cerulean blue, plastic, text, and fake flowers in an installation the purpose of which he makes clear in his blog

‘Behind the superficial appearance may just lie hidden some deep truth. On the other side of visual images one may just find verbal words.

The landscape that I set up was completely fake and fussy. Fake trees. Fake shrubs. Fake leaves. Fake flowers. They were all made of plastic fabric.

Yet these multi-coloured flowers hid within their petals intimate, sincere and profound words. Words that could not be spoken by their unknown owners in front of the crowd. Those were the unseen twists and turns of the soul. Those were the true stories.’

The Vietnamese incarnation at L’Espace has visual and perhaps even ideological differences but for me, appears to utter the same ethos of universal individual oppression/repression. Deliberately manufactured fakery, glitz and glam, neo conservative agendas seek out and smother spontaneity, dignity, and assertions of concern.

Tran Trong Vu’s last outing in Hanoi was in October 2014 at the Dolphin Plaza where he installed a huge and brilliant work THE EXPONENTSWITHOUT NUMBER in the 3D style that has made him internationally famous

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/107407936[/vimeo]

In May 2014 he installed a version of his CORRESPONDENCES OF A SOLITARY MAN at Manzi – a very complexing though powerful work that references words of dissidence

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/63002815[/vimeo]

To conclude: a 2016 work in oil on canvas, THE BLUE COUNTRY that seems to be about a neighborhood crisis