(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
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