jjj WONDERFUL IN SAIGON jjj
Bui Cong Khanh is a 37-year-old visual artist from Hoi An, with a protean work. Currently based in Ho
Chi Minh city, he will soon present his creations in Singapore and at the Asia Pacific
Triennale in Australia. As always for this artist, his mission is to show the audience his vision of today’s Vietnam.
Graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Ho Chi Minh City Fine Art University, Bui Cong Khanh
re-took up residence in that city for two years. His conversational practice of French and English languages helped him to carry on by himself with his artistic education and to exchange views
with foreign artists, since he finished his school record. Thanks to this knowledge, he then had opportunities to travel, do artists residencies and show his work in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia,
Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and in France.
Through several mediums (painting, installation, video, sculpture, performance art…),
Khanh humbly attempts to share with the public his existence as a simple Vietnamese citizen. « What I want is to present the present as simply as possible; like when we close our eyes and we
can hear the noises in the streets. I paint life calmly, as if writing my diary », he says.
The simplicity he claims often
matches literal representation of his ideas. The consequence of this is a loss of poetry; it is the main critic we can make of his work.
However, it is this literality which makes the work comprehensible for the Vietnamese audience or the foreigner willing to look at Vietnamese culture.
While evolving in the fields of Contemporary Art, Bui Cong Khanh’s work, by virtue of the topics he deals with or the techniques he uses, is
resolutely accessible to everybody, from the coffee-seller of the shop round the corner to the Contemporary Museum Director, including the tourist.
Although the subjects approached by Khanh come to him spontaneously, one topic is recurrent: the one of the confluence of Modern style - influenced by the
West -, and Ancient style – borrowing from Chinese culture. From this confrontation between the Past and the Present, he tries to draw the outlines of a true Vietnamese Cultural identity of
today. We can say that this positioning is the backbone of his whole work.
sketch for "The Hit of New and Old" series
Made in Bat Trang village (North Vietnam) with local craftsmen, the series of porcelain vases entitled “The Hit of New and Old” is
part of the most recent works illustrating his concerns on modern and traditional Vietnam. Each vase tells a long and complex story – at times autobiographic, where childhood memories, scenes of
everyday life, Pop Song’s titles, symbols of political power mix together with traditional patterns – waves, fishes and dragons.
Bui Cong Khanh says he wanted to « paint on the ceramic vases in a traditional way to put the culture of modern life into the shape and size of the past to see if they can go along together or if it is just a ridiculous attempt. »
This series is the consecration of a work started two years ago with the artisans of Bat Trang. It will be exhibited at the Asia Pacific
Triennale in Australia from December 5th 2009.
"Dollar Man", photograph and performance
Performance Art is the medium that made Bui Cong Khanh easy to identify on the international art scene. He was indeed invited to be
part of many Performance Art festivals like NIPAF in Japan or ASIATOPIA in Thailand.
Like when he paints, in his performances Khanh merely aims at showing today’s Vietnam, his Vietnam. However here, his commitment takes a new dimension; the physical confrontation of the artist with his audience makes the topic harsher, the critic bitter. With his body given for watching – or for touching –he expresses the anxieties he alleges to his people: anxiety of too fast a race toward the consumer society (for example in the performance “Dollar Man” he did in 2005) or aroused by a bureaucratic system (“Stamp Me”, realized in 2004).
Next November, he will be part of Asia Performance Art in Seoul, South Korea and will present a new performance.
"Love Juice". oil painting on canvas
But Khanh’s closer topicality brings us to Singapore, where he is part of a group exhibition called “Intersection Vietnam : New works
from North & South” at Valentine Willie Fine Art. This show, which has already been displayed in Kuala Lumpur last June, will be held in Singapore in September.
He presents notably here a new series of paintings where he pictures the locking up of huge concepts in drink cans (“Juice of Love”, “Juice of Power”...), ready to be consumed, then thrown away.
This series is emblematic of his work: it affirms his desire of dealing with big precepts and philosophical issues but in his own way, which
means by bringing them back modestly to the scale of everyday life.
More informations about
the exhibition “Intersection Vietnam : New works from North & South” at Valentine Willie Fine Art on http://www.vwfa.net
sketch pour expo de novembre a Hanoi Future Art
Samedi c’etait notre grande rentree des classes Jetlag avec la soiree GMT+8 qu’on organisait a Cage. Preparatifs longtemps a l’avance et, avec Olive, Bert et la team de Cage, 3 jours pour tout installer. Pour changer de l’annee derniere ou a chaque Jetlag on recouvrait quasiment tous les murs de videoprojections, on a choisi de construire une structure en bois au milieu, un grand cube de 3m20 de large et haut jusqu’au plafond dans lequel etaient installes des DJs et sur lequel je projetais sur les 4 faces. Durant la journee, Mike avait emmene ses platines a la boutique de T-Shirts de Ben dans le quartier routard et a mixe pendant que le staff de la boutique et Anna distribuaient des flys aux quelques passants. On pensait rameuter du monde avec ca mais en fait les rues etaient un peu desertes... Bert a un peu joue en fin d’aprem la bas une fois que l’instal a Cage etait finie.
La soiree a Cage a commence vers 8h avec le concert des Black Infinity.
Puis Mike, suivi de notre DJ guest, Toti venu de Manille puis, avec le retard pris, Olive et Bert qui se sont partage une petite heure de mix a deux. Pas grand monde par rapport a ce qu’on
attendait. Par rapport a l’argent et l’energie investis, on est globalement assez decus a cause de ca. Par contre l’installation etait tres reussie. Quelques images pour donner une idee...
Showcase devant la boutique de Ben a Pham Ngu Lao
(a paraitre egalement dans le prochain Noi That)
The work of the young and very promising Hanoian artist Nguyen Phuong Linh was recently displayed at Galerie Quynh.
Her exhibition entitled “Salt” was the second event
presented within the context of the Emerging Artists Program initiated by the gallery a few months ago.
"Boat" (unrefined
salt)
Nguyen Phuong Linh is an artist with a very atypical career. Unlike most of her acolytes, she didn’t study at the Fine Art
University but has been plunged in the world of contemporary art since she was very young, when her father Nguyen Manh Duc opened the famous NhaSan Studio with artist and curator Tran Luong
eleven years ago. Thanks to the activities of this pioneer space of contemporary art in Hanoi, Phuong Linh could mix with experimental Vietnamese and foreign artists. This proximity strongly has
influenced her choice of becoming an artist in her turn.
From then on, she tried to access to an academic artistic education but this experience proved to be fruitless. Conscious of what was necessary for her to learn in order to succeed in expressing herself in her way; she took drastic decisions like stopping the studies she had started at the Accademia Albertina Belle di Arti in Torino, Italia.
Her first aesthetical shock happened in 2002, when an art teacher she met in a school trip
in Texas showed her a book of Christo and Jeanne Claude. She discovered there that wrapping buildings and recovering landscapes could be considered as a work of art and this discovery became
decisive; when she went back to Hanoi she joined a group of young Vietnamese contemporary artists.
(drawing on paper)
While some artists need an academic learning to be able to wander from it afterwards, Phuong Linh, who never felt tied to this, shows great freedom in her work, which doesn’t exclude a definite
maturity. She succeeded in imposing constraints on herself to answer her own aesthetical criteria and the result offers great consistency in her body of works.
Her art works are almost always linked to the female sexuality. The artist is particularly fond of the wet aspect of the material she uses and of the organic references - we find it obvious in her abstract drawings made of a multitude of intermingled lines.
Two of her previous sculptures – “Negative” and “Allergy” –
are made of worn clothes (a dress and a bra), transfixed with nails and splashed with a laminator liquid that rigidifies the whole, giving it thus a wet appearance, with great transparent
streaks.
"Melting" (unrefined salt, clay, soil,
plexiglass tray, water, plastic globe, fishing wire)
Even when she gently tries to go away from them, as she did in “Salt”, female curves keep arising– breasts, buttocks, genitals – even when they are extremely
stylized. This wet aspect was also present again in this exhibition owing to the use of untreated salt.
The art pieces realized for “Salt” were quite minimal and it is quite unusual to see this kind of aesthetics in Vietnam. But more than a great tendency to formalism, the subtlety of these art pieces lies in the diversity of readings they allow the viewer.
The viewer’s eyes were at first oriented by the presentation of the artist’s process, the photographs and a video-documentary about the villages of salt workers with whom she stayed during her research trips. Phuong Linh asserts she was stunned by their way of life and their hard conditions of work, but it is more the discovery of this new material and the great beauty of the salt landscapes that deeply inspired her. She has finally tried to recreate in her exhibition a large minimal and imaginary landscape. Most of the exhibited pieces were made of pack in tight salt and they crumble little by little, turning the exhibition into an almost alive, mutant entity. A particular muted violence was added to this, thanks to the corrosive nature of the salt.
One of the sculptures, entitled “Boat” – but we could also see it as an eye, a mouth or female genitals - took up almost the entire ground-floor space while upstairs a landscape made of little rounded mounds ran alongside with a salt pyramid on which water was dropping (“Melting”). These salt sculptures were radiating genuine poetry, compensated yet by the down-to-earth aspect of the documentary and the photographs.
“Salt” was the first solo-exhibition Phuong Linh did in Ho Chi Minh city and the “Salt Project” was her first long term project. She wants to close it by bringing some pieces back to the salt villages to take some pictures of them in this very unique landscape. Now, she starts looking for new unstable materials, new materials capable of giving a voice to her ideas.
More information about Nguyen Phuong Linh and Galerie Quynh on http://www.galeriequynh.com
(a paraitre - en
vietnamien - dans le prochain numero du magazine Noi That)
"Heath" (oil painting on canvas)
The British-born Australian artist Vincent Fantauzzo started his Asia Tour by exhibiting 26 works at Y Ngoc – Si Hoang Gallery in Ho Chi
Minh City.
Borderline artists.
While it used to be easy to categorize a creator – to distinguish for example a painter from a sculptor, in the field of contemporary art artists are more and more unclassifiable.
Besides the fact that they juggle with great ease from painting to video, from sculpture to music, from drawing to performance and that they can be also graphic designers, DJs, VJs, writers, curators or teachers, it sometimes happens as well that they proved to be great professionals of marketing - following a Jeff Koons or a Damien Hirst.
This polyvalence is even sometimes claimed as a full part of the artist’s work, while answering the need of earning a living.
When looking into today's creation, especially in Vietnam, we notice also artists situated on the borderline between two categories: the advocates of a strictly commercial art aiming at attracting a large clientèle and those who claim experimental or just more personal art.
That is maybe what drove artist Vincent Fantauzzo to choose Ho Chi Minh City to be the first stop of his exhibitions’ tour in Asia, beyond the fact that “he is finding Vietnam an inspiration” – as he confided it to some local journalists.
The series of oil paintings exhibited at Y Ngoc – Si Hoang Gallery was composed of hyper-realistic portraits and scenes.
By passing in front of the windows of this place, we could
have thought that we were dealing again with one of these copyists’ galleries as there are by the hundreds in Saigon and in which painters are as clever in copying a De Vinci or a Lichtenstein as
they are in reproducing the passport photograph of our sister.
"Brandon" (oil painting on canvas)
Two portraits – that have led Fantauzzo to win the Archibald Prize two consecutive years – were highlighted: “Brandon” – portrait of the young aboriginal actor Brandon Walters and “Heath” –
representing actor Heath Ledger who died a few weeks after the achievement of his portrait as he was only 28 years old. Because the original painting “Heath” couldn’t be sent to Vietnam, numbered
and signed reproductions were here for sale – at the price of 3000 USD per piece. Ten copies were sold on the night of the opening. Thus, the other original paintings exhibited were for sale for
a few tens of thousands of dollars.
The media buzz generated in Australia by these two art works – together with a discourse made of trivial details about the lives and careers of the two actors and their deep relationship with the artist – drives us to question the positioning of Vincent Fantauzzo.
Are we dealing with a young sentimental artist, naïve and
manipulated by his dealers or with a real businessman-artist, eye-catching like one Salvador Dali and playing with the Medias like Andy Warhol?
"Now We Are In This
Together" (oil painting on canvas)
The artist as a schizophrenic.
The painting entitled “Inner Conflict” may be seen as an illustration of Fantauzzo's difficulty to position himself in the art world. This large triptych stages five self-portraits of the artist on a scale of 1. Four of these characters take part in a violent fight, while the last one sits in the corner and watches the scene without any reaction.
Even though this painting has been realized recently, it revives his older more narrative works, like “Now We Are In This Together » or « 11pm ».
In those paintings, Fantauzzo already showed his perfect technical skill of oil painting and of the representation of the light but reached the viewer in a far more subtle way. Through centrings borrowed from the field of cinema – obvious in “Burning” or “Point of No Return” – the imagination of the viewer is requested and the viewer is plunged into a dramatic ambiance, closer to noir cinema than to the blockbusters linked up with his last works.
Next stops of Vincent Fantauzzo Asia tour will be in Bangkok, Singapore, Mumbai and Shanghai. His works are visible on his website: http://www.vincentfantauzzo.com/
* quote by Salvador Dali
boite aux lettres