KVT – Vu Kim Thu Illumes the Velvet Dark @ Manzi

Upstairs at Manzi, in the back gallery, Vu Kim Thu has a winner

The light installation in a black space is an extremely delicious taste of what may come to be – in the future – in a huge gallery.

For me, at first glance it was as though I was looking at buildings on a moonless night rimming the outer hill on the perimeter of a town or city… perhaps from the vantage of an airplane coming into land or, in this madder and madder world, a military drone seeking out a middle eastern target to blast to smithereens.

Then from above I imagined a typical, small Vietnamese rural town that is contained by paddy fields or mountains on one side and the bend of a river on the other. The arcs of light merge and then spread and grow less dense as the outskirts are smothered by darkness as black as the inside of a water buffalo’s stomach

Each arc is covered with line drawings (or doodles) of fanciful and real structures that make up a phantasmagorical architectural map of the place. It’s as though you a night stranger to the town attempting to comprehend its half hidden byways-or a child resident playing make believe through its alleys

I can imagine, in that huge gallery as mentioned above, a whole, lit up, fantasy town spread over ridges, dipping through valleys until its outer environs are overcome by total, squid inky, velvet soft, moonless darkness. Such an installation could arouse viewer speculations and interpretations to fever pitch.

In the down stairs gallery, on prosaic plinths, are individual examples of the artist’s lanterned doodled arcs and free forms

A lot of viewers will translate the doodley line drawings as being Japanese influenced…and of course they are partially correct as the artist has had several art residencies in Japan – as well as in South Korea – and her Japanese experiences influenced a reduction in size of her individual pieces and invited a minimalist approach. As the Manzi PR states: ‘Into Darkness’ is the outcome of Kim Thu’s continuous experimentation in combining Japanese Washi with Vietnamese Dzo paper, and line drawing with lighting.

A cunning device that the artist often uses is to invite the viewer to peer into the interiors of her works, a bit like encouraging the voyeur that exists in everyone’s psyches… sometimes through windows, sometimes through telescoping tunnels

Fans interested in catching an example of Vu Kim Thu’s other recent doodled lantern sculptures (2014 – and exampled below) could scoot along to Art Vietnam’s current group extravaganza

Anyone who has followed the artist’s doodling career may turn their minds back to 2013 and L’Espace when her illumination phase first caught their attention… including those initial, deviously enchanting invitations to bend in close and take an interior peek

They’ll also recall an earlier incarnational phase in 2012 at L’Espace before all became illuminated

Some art aficionados who can remember 2010 will recall Vu Kim Thu returning to Hanoi after a residency in parts of vibrantly colored India and splashing her Rangoli in shades of purple and acid lime and yellow through Bui Gallery in Ngo Van So Street

A very lucky few will cast their minds back to 2006 when the artist decided to chuck out all of the expectations that beset a well brought up female artist and she said farewell to figurative paintings and lacquer and doodled big time in black and white and had grand and oozing lines smoldering and moldering from the Bookworm’s Ngo Van So gallery walls… after which she residenced in Japan prior to the miniaturization epoch in her life

This year the artist had a residency in South Africa and is still untangling the exotic threads in her mind and these may become clearer and influence some of the work she’ll do in the mountains of Vermont come Fall.