Maison des Arts – Long Bien open project

Memoir of the Long Bien Bridge

– continuous project – still open to all and to all art forms.

Each presentation will continue about one week.
If you want to discover this presentation or join the next one, please come to visit us.
14 artists have responded to the Maison des arts call for this first presentation:

Four video directors, Nguyen Thi Bich Ngoc, Memory, Nguyen Huu Hong, Long Bien at night, Pham Van Truong, Line of time, Pham Cuong and Nguyen Thuoc, Hanoi has the Long Bien Bridge, propose video artwork between documentary and performance. An opportunity to discover unusual Long Bien Bridge’s look, life in the 1990, Long Bien at night, surprising performance about memory and time by two young artists.

The sculptor Vuong Thao exhibits one of his famous living fossil representing a part of the bridge enclosed in a resin jewel-case. Vuong Thao works nowadays on a vast project of 105 sculptures. The installation will be presented at the Maison des arts in autumn.

5 photographers have pointed their lens, their looks on the bridge, each revealing an individual feeling.
The photo-journalist Na Son proposes a very attractive and pure black in white artwork about the people having a bath on the river, under the bridge and some other daily life moment, wedding, worker refreshing himself, sellers on bicycle.
Lam Khanh is also interested in the bridge’s below, his photographies show kids living on the banks on the river, their games, their life. Their malicious smile and look make us forget their difficult life.
The American Justin Maxon, winner of the World Press 2008, presented in the exhibition 7 stories, exhibit one photography of his coverage Companionship in poverty relating the life of a mother and her child on the Long Bien Bridge, between roaming, madness, pain and moment of happiness almost primitive.
Trong Tung propose a photographic work reminiscent of painting at the limits of abstraction and color fields. He shows bridge’s close-up as bolt, wild grass, paint numbers.
Douglas Jardine, an American living in Hanoi since many years, is very attached to the beauty of the Long Bien Bridge, that why he spends a lot of time on it, looking for pictures. He offers his vision of the bridge as a place for life, meeting, work and when on the island the corn have grown up he dreams of his Texas native.

Four painters participate as well to this first presentation.
Luc Quoc Nhuong is interested in the workers who like in an ant-hill hurry up day and night, on and under the bridge.
Tran An Quan invites us to discover his poetic universe in which colored flat tint become fleeting moment as his morning on the river.
Bui Thanh Phuong, the son of the famous painter Bui Xuan Phai, bring us to a romantic boat trip on the Red River.
For Phan Thi Minh Chau the bridge is the real subject of her paintings, the architecture, the metallic beam. Her art work reach a high intensity in her painting The Black and White bridge.