TADIOTO

FINAL WEEK OF EXHIBITION AT TADIOTO (Tiếng Việt, xin bấm vào đây)

Born in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam-American War, Nguyen Thuy Hang belongs to a generation that came of age as Viet Nam opens up to the world and is fast on road to development and urbanization.  Her generation is, expectedly, less burdened with the sorrows and trauma of war, indirectly aware of its players, its triumphs and failures.  Nonetheless, this generation is constantly confronted with its consequences—even as it becomes more confident and expressive, somewhat self-centered and aware of its potentials in the world.

In the period ushered in by the policy of reform called Đổi mới, or Renovation, ten years after the war, some artists merely turned to clichéd and romanticized images of Viet Nam—a monk under banana or lotus leaf, a girl in a traditional tunic, or a peaceful country scene with children, buffaloes and rice fields—while writers exposed the horrors and mistakes of a long-heralded war.

Among the artists of this generation, some did turn a critical eye on the post-war society that Viet Nam has become, decrying a world turned upside down with a population unable and unskilled to cope with modernization and urbanization. Some artists have become well-known and celebrated in circles from New York to Tokyo, and from Shanghai to Dubai, precisely because of what is perceived as political, anti-state messages, with less than flattering—or downright “crude and rude” images of suited or uniformed men and women resembling underworld figures more than leaders in a modern civil society.

Thuy Hang also provides an expression of discontentment, but she remains more indirect. What she describes in her paintings and sculptures, as well as in her poems and prose, is less about those responsible for unchecked modernization but rather those having to suffer its consequences. In this, Thuy Hang remains close to her female contemporaries—in particular those who choose to highlight the difficulties and pained lives of Vietnamese women.

Painters like Dinh Y Nhi (b. 1967) and Ly Tran Quynh Giang (b. 1978) have long asked their viewers to contemplate melancholic figures and troubled faces—in the case of Dinh Y Nhi, black, white and gray, cartoon-like stick figures, and faces with little personal features.  They can sometimes be ghostly and harrowing, nonetheless evoking both a troubled and sympathetic response. As impersonal as they seem, these are characters clearly forced into the same difficult fate and destiny.

Ly Tran Quynh Giang’s oil portraits of women equally evoke a melancholic sensibility, often mixing somber canvases with pale colors—aquamarine, light greens, beige…, with a white and gray undertone.

The women she paints with strong and thick brush strokes sometimes also carry indistinct features, except all seem to have adopted the same voluntary silence, dignity in their pose, and stoicism in their distant eyes.

Her wood carvings consist of emaciated and distorted women, or disfigured limbs.

Faces, poses or disjointed limbs—the women here seem bound, unable to move, and stoicism again a strong personality trait in the images confronting us.

Dinh Thi Tham Poong, born of mixed ethnic heritage in 1970, depicts women in traditional tribal costumes: at first they resemble paintings found in souvenir shops catering to tourists looking for an exotic image.

A closer examination will reveal that these women too are straddling ancient and modern customs, and Tham Poong’s approach to her paintings raises questions and understanding about the women’s relationship with nature, and about their means of self-expression through ethnic garments, accessories, and decorations that otherwise are viewed singularly in their exotic, tribal representation, rather than individualistic identity.

Nguyen Thi Chau Giang (b. 1975) also paints women in pain: hers are delicate, almost pretty, portraits, with romantic and realistic renderings of leaves, flowers or clouds forming a pleasant background.

But against such an attractive backdrop, her images confront you with unforgiving wounds: a missing eye, a pierced eye socket, dried branches on clothing that convey blood veins and spreading injuries, much in the same ways Frida Kahlo depicted her physical and psychological pain. Other images of women in Chau Giang’s paintings also refer to shriveling bodies, caught in a life of hardship, spousal or motherhood demands, and the aging process.

So are the women in Thuy Hang’s sculptural works.

Distorted, forced into difficult and unnatural physical (and mental) states, they are conforming to both traditional and modern demands. These are not new themes or concerns for women in the West, but here, Thuy Hang succeeds in expressing what women still struggle with in the post-war, modernizing context of Vietnamese society.

Born in Saigon in 1978, Thuy Hang graduated from the University of Fine Arts of Ho Chi Minh City with a B.A. in 2002. She was a recipient of The Young Artists’ Arts Grant Program 2006 of Melbourne, Australia, and also studied privately in Minnesota and California, U.S.A.

For many years, Thuy Hang was reluctant to participate in the art world in Viet Nam, as she fears the public cultural activities in Vietnamese society often has less to do with quality of the work—particularly in the field of visual arts—and more to do with “acceptable artistic expressions,” and the unavoidable issues of fame and fortune, and by extension, attention from the outside world.

Thuy Hang has held infrequent exhibitions. They include three group shows, “Saigon Artists” (Van Art Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, 2008), “Trees” (Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2006) and “Hide away,” (private studio, Ho Chi Minh City, 2003.) Most recently, she had a solo exhibition, “The Gang” at Viet Art Centre, Hanoi 2008.

By not exhibiting much, Thuy Hang indirectly comments on the artistic world that she sees as male-dominated, much in the same way Vietnamese society is. “We women work all the time, and are more steady,” she says. It’s a subtle acknowledgement of a well known “secret” in the artistic world in which the lives of male artists are marked by infrequent periods of work, and more frequent periods of entertainment, drinking, romantic dalliances—and yet, they have more frequent exhibits and are more well known.

Thuy Hang sometimes refers playfully to “hedonistic” activities, and it verges on a message about how it’s her rights and desire to enjoy life like a man. Behaving like men is no longer a privilege but an equal opportunity for them and women. And yet in truth, Hang enjoys and struggles with long periods of self-imposed isolation, concentrating on her paintings, sculptures, or writing.

While she appears quite open, it will be rare when she will discuss her sexuality either in her work or in life. As a writer and a poet, Thuy Hang often deals with a sense of alienation among modern women of Viet Nam, sometimes in surrealistic “prose poems.” She has published four books: her publications include “Because We Haven’t Been Able to Sleep” (Youth Publishing House & Knowledge Publishing House, Hanoi, 2008) and the trilogy “Current Times, Good Sensations, and Reasonable Insanity,” (Youth Publishing House & Knowledge Publishing House, Hanoi, 2006).

Thuy Hang has currently been working with paintings of pale white faces, with large open mouths, expressing a desire to scream out—yet the message remains somehow muted, silenced, or left unheard. In her sculptural works, the difficulties of women of her generation are presented with distorted bodies, the figures forcing themselves into twisted positions while carrying new, equally deformed bodies—a comment on the traditions placed on women as they fulfill their roles as wives and mothers, and societal caregivers.

The rough, white cloth Thuy Hang uses to bind these figures of wood and metal also is a cloth of mourning. The same cloth is used to mourn the branches and trees destroyed as Viet Nam embarks on a process of urbanization. The white cloth also carries Hang’s wish for a simpler society, a purity fast disappearing in the streets and lives of Ha Noi. The viewer is forced to look at these sculptures, and the women they represent, from odd angles. Some of these pieces remind us of a butcher shop or a slaughterhouse freezer, with figures and limbs hanging from the ceiling in ghostly manners. Other pieces are reminiscent of modern dance movements, with branches and heads made of resin reaching across space in hopeful yet stunted strides.

The sculptures are called “That Bunch,” a term one may use, Hang says, to describe people of her post-war generation. It is somewhat derogatory in the way people refer to a generation thought to be self-absorbed and unfamiliar with the war-time sacrifices of previous generations. However the self-appellation could also be a tongue-in-cheek, ironic way to describe themselves, “that bunch” of women struggling to define themselves in a society caught in the mayhem of rapid development.