Art start for the year of the cat

Unlike nearby Asian countries that are about to enter the year of the rabbit, Vietnam chooses to start the year of the cat. And Ho Chi Minh City has a mixed bag of art up in its best (and rare) contemporary art spaces.

Craig Thomas Gallery has a group show themed around self-portraiture, with paintings that range from samey to dramatic to humourous.

Nguyen Quang Vinh has created his ‘catman’ series at an appropriate time. The cat-morphous faces hold the glory of pop colour and fun, but don’t offer any deep insights into human (or animal) psychology. They’re well painted and amusing to look at once, but don’t pose any questions – other than maybe how saleable a work might be if it repeats tried and tested compositions and ideas a generation later.

Le Kinh Tai is being promoted as Vietnam’s enfant terrible, and he does a good job of pumping energy into the local art scene. He too goes for vibrant colours and some humour, but adds street art influences, and heavy texture à la Dubuffet,  to create some messy images that could be hybrids of an Anselm Kiefer and a Keith Haring, if such a genetic experiment could be spliced. Craig Thomas’s beautiful space is suffused by the muted gazes of Luong Luu Bien and Nguyen Thuy Hang.

He palettes and glazes the paint to develop some serious but not despondent, richly moody group portraits, while she works on producing quiet and calm expressions akin to ‘The Scream’. Venice carnival masks turn mannerist while giving birth. The line begs for a bit more lighthearted fluidity, but this young artist is working on getting something out of her system. If she doesn’t end up waning in self-pity in years to come, she’ll be an interesting one to watch.

Gallery Quynh, for a full 3 months, is showing Nguyen Trung’s new ‘Grey White Black’ series. Trung is one of Vietnam’s original exponents of abstract art, and has experimented much in his 50 years of practice.

The press release states that the source of inspiration for this series, apart from formal exploration of monochrome compositions, is the ‘urban fabric of Ho Chi Minh City’.

Clearly, fear of censorship or a desire to please/appease the public have omitted a much rawer topic. The paintings are scratched and drawn into with disgustingly disembodied genitalia. Saigon may be grey and rough and itchy with injustices, but it is far from being the dispassionate sexual exchange that appears here. It would be interesting to know if the motivation for euphemistically inventing the city subject matter is one of discreet shame or one of deluded self-indulgence.

Thankfully San-Art save the month by putting up a joyous group show of gallery artists. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, from The Propeller Group, has carved self-immolating Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc (d. 1963) into a baseball bat that sits righteously in the center of the show. The sculpture is superbly crafted, but at $10,000 (and it’s an edition of 5!), the pricing is out of place with the rest of the exhibits – and the country’s GDP.

The lightboxes in the background are the work of Tammy Nguyen, who seems to be growing well into her art career since moving to Vietnam from the US. Her embroidered, painted and printed work, most recently in some form of a 3D casing, is wonderful to ponder over, enjoying the overlapping layers of media. It seems to collect together the best of feminist art practices since the 70s, while discussing multicultural concerns in a wholly coherent way.

The founder of San-Art himself, Dinh Q. Le, contributes another bizarre hybrid artwork made a decade ago. The little resin figurines of Lotus Land are cute and toy-like, but their spliced bodies, thankfully much less disturbing that the Chapman brother’s ‘children’, ooze a mysterious sadness.

Nguyen Thai Tuan really tackles feelings of unease, with some of the Black Paintings dated 2009. The clean and powerful oil images report a social silence that resonate powerfully in Vietnam, but are graphic enough to be construed as old film stills or political strife in other continents.

Walking out the little gallery into the sunshine again, you can’t help but smile passing the Juice barrels painted by Bui Cong Khanh. Borrowing again from Pop Art, his works are not sinister, but carry a similar ‘prettified’ social critique as Cheri Samba’s glittery paintings. Both artists make work that appears cheerful and amusing to look at, but adds a spoonful of sugar to some ugly truths. May the year of the cat continue with that colourful glee!

#Painting #Saigon #SanArt #WomenArtists