VALENTINE WILLE FINE ART

press release

Intersection Vietnam: New works from North & South

An understanding of contemporary Vietnamese art necessarily involves an examination of the country’s 20th century history. Colonialism, nationalist revolt, North-South partition, the American war, and Ho Chi Minh’s communism have all shaped contemporary Vietnam, North and South, in singular ways. More recently, as the nation has opened up economically to the outside world as a result of Doi Moi, the commodification of the nostalgia associated with a more distant past has permeated the art scene. The latter has grown exponentially in the last 15 years, Vietnam’s nascent art market fostering the production of much banal work of a purely commercial nature.

Despite the dominance of the commercial market, a number of Vietnamese practitioners, operating on the margins of the mainstream, and often recognised internationally rather than in their own country, have succeeded in giving Vietnamese expression an alternative face. The aim of this exhibition, Valentine Willie Fine Art’s first foray into the world of Vietnamese contemporary, is to present the complex and interconnected realities of today’s Vietnam through the art of emerging talent as well as more established practitioners. Intersection Vietnam: New works from North and South includes seven internationally exhibited artists at various stages of their career who through different media and formal strategies, all narrate Vietnam.

Hanoi-based Tran Luong, considered Vietnam’s pioneer conceptual artist and best known for his powerful performances, contributes an elegantly conceived video work which through humour and public interaction, probes Vietnam and Cambodia’s shared recent history. Vu Dan Tan, also from Hanoi, is a multi-disciplinary artist who was amongst the first generation of practitioners to gain international prominence in the 1990’s. For Intersection Vietnam .he produces quirkily erotic sculptural installations from his ongoing Amazon metal armor series, as well as a sequence of new self-portraits. Figurative painting is also explored by young Saigon-native performance artist Nguyen Thao. Favouring unctuous oil on canvas, Thao’s impasto depictions of prowling dogs are edgy and energetic, recalling her tightly controlled and electrifying raw meat performances.

Hanoi painter and video artist Nguyen Quang Huy’s film installation Story of a Face featured in the 2008 Singapore Biennale. Here Huy presents large-scale monochrome portraits of Vietnamese women. Interested in woman as icon as well as the broader implications of the female condition in Vietnam, Nguyen Quang Huy brings a contemporary sensibility and conceptual approach to his portraiture.

Though a native of Hanoi and a graduate of the Hanoi Fine Arts University, Hoang Duong Cam now lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. Cam has experimented with a plethora of media over the years. Recently however, it is his photography that has catapulted him into the international limelight. For Intersection Vietnam .he presents his new 11-print series of digital photographs Ideal Fall. Technically sophisticated and visually poetic with a whiff of rawness, Ideal Fall, publicly presented for the first time at VWFA, epitomizes a fast-evolving Vietnam as the country grapples with its multi-tiered history and ambitions for the future.

Now living in Saigon, Tuan Andrew Nguyen grew up in California. Part of the team responsible for the 2006 Helicopter/history video installation The Farmers and the Helicopters that is now in New York’s Museum of Modern Art collection, Tuan makes intelligent work about history and the intersection of Vietnamese and outsider contemporary culture. Thoughtful and visually arresting, his multi-media, trans-disciplinary installations, often epic in nature, mirror and explain Vietnam’s many paradoxes and layered identity.

Khanh Bui, like Hoang Duong Cam, straddles North and South. Formally polyvalent, the artist brings his ironic yet sympathetic take on Vietnamese society’s idiosyncrasies to painting and ceramics alike. His work recently selected for exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland, Khanh Bui is making new pieces for Intersection Vietnam.

Vietnam has, until recently, sat on the fringe of the Southeast Asian visual art circuit, its connections with the United States more developed than those established with its own neighbors. Yet Vietnamese expressive practices, at their best diverse and compelling, look at Vietnamese society, identity, and history with a characteristically Southeast Asian multi-prismic perspective. With Intersection Vietnam: new work from North and South, VWFA trains a spotlight on some of the most dynamic and significant artists working in Vietnam today.

The exhibition’s curator Iola Lenzi is a Singapore-based critic and curator specializing in the contemporary visual practices of South East Asia. She is a frequent contributor to Asian and European art periodicals and has written extensively about Vietnamese art.