Participating Artists:
Khánh Công Bùi
Tiffany Chung
Phù Nam Thúc Hà
Christine Nguyễn
Thi Trinh Nguyễn
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn
Tuấn Thái Nguyễn
Tú Đức Nguyễn
Rich Streitmatter - Trần
Co-curated by Dinh Q. Lê and Zoe Butt in cooperation with San Art, Ho Chi Minh City
Circulating within our image-burdened world are creative wanderers that ponder the vestiges of mediated fact and control — the crumbling layers of paint on government walls; the memory of a burning, martyred monk; the quasi-morphing of local habit with the experiential remnants of a ‘European Elsewhere’ — these itinerant image makers of Vietnam contort such hidden shifts into concrete form in Time Ligaments.
In this exhibition nine perspectives grapple with the persisting memories of a country where the past stubbornly lingers in the literal and mental landscape of the everyday. Their stories traverse the experience of migration and return; the metamorphosis of popular foreign trend with local custom; the stymied struggle of resistance against historical ideas of social control; or the increasing urban dilettante whose material desires lay waste to their history and surroundings. Time is schizophrenically warped in the photographically paused moments of Tu Duc Nguyen, while Phu Nam Thuc Ha’s lens captures the surfaces of crumbling government walls marveling at how time is the nascent agent of change. In Tuan Thai Nguyen’s careful paintings, where working life holds hostage to ideas of individual social worth, a crouching headless figure dressed in office garb faces a corner of an empty room. Such psychological influence of a neo-liberal world is also of great import in the gouache rendered drawings of Khanh Cong Bui and the conceptual sculptures of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, where ideas of deterioration and control are given broader metaphorical context in examining how the tools of a game operate as political strategy in pacifying conflict and terror, not just in Vietnam.
This is but a brief glance of the layered complex narratives in this exhibition where nine provocative artists will be showcased through painting, video, photography, sculptural installation and works on paper.
Artists Khanh Cong Bui, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Rich Streitmatter-Tran, together with curators Dinh Q. Lê and Zoe Butt will be in Hong Kong from May 13th–17th. The exhibition runs from May 14th-August 16th 2009.
Artist’s Talk and High Tea | May 15th 3:30pm at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Central.
Zoe Butt is Deputy Director of the Long March Project, a complex, multi-platform, international arts organization and ongoing art project based in Beijing, China. She is also a member of San Art, an independent artist-run gallery and reading room in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Previously she was Assistant Curator, Contemporary Asian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia where she assisted in the development of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT); key acquisitions for the Contemporary Asian art collection, and other associated gallery programs. For over 10 years she has been researching contemporary Asian art and has both independently and collaboratively curated exhibitions and contributed to various international art publications that have reflected the dynamic art of this region.
