Lien Truong – Sàn Art: Achieving Regional Dialogue (Part 4)

As we bid farewell to the year of the Horse and welcome the new lunar year of the Goat, Diacritic Lien Truong asked four influential contemporary art spaces in Vietnam to reflect on this previous year and pick an exhibition or event in their programming that had significant impact on their mission and creative cultural climate. The series of posts will highlight events from Manzi Art Space and Nha San Collective in Hanoi, and Galerie Quynh and San Art in Ho Chi Minh City.

Sàn Art

48/7 Me Linh Street, District Binh Thanh, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam

 

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Truong Cong Tung, Journey of a piece of soil (detail), 2014 Termite nest, paint, 38 x 40 x 60 cm

Established in 2007 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Sàn Art is an independent, artist-initiated, non-profit gallery space and reading room, an impetus motivated by the anemic platform for contemporary art in country a decade ago.  Within 8 years, it has established itself as a dynamic force in Vietnam. Under director Zoe Butt, a curator who previously lived and worked in China, and a board of directors including artists Dinh Q. Le, members of the Propeller Group, and experienced art professionals from the US and Australia, Sàn Art aims to provide programming which mirrors the comprehensive conditions in contemporary art practice.

The organization supports visual art, literature, performance and vocational activities through exhibitions, lectures, workshops, artist presentations and residency programs.  Their mission is mindful of the critical relationship between art and society. Sàn Art creates a hub of knowledge for contemporary art and culture in Vietnam, supporting the diverse process and complicated means in helping local artists realize their work from inception to exhibition. Sàn Art also provides an important portal for creative activity between Vietnam, regional, and global participants. Sàn Art Laboratory offers young Vietnamese and South East Asian artists 6 months to live and work, providing a studio, room and board, and a grant towards production of their work. Included in this award is the significant support given to generate artists’ awareness and critical engagement of their work through a global, modernized lens.

Conscious Realities was initiated on the principal to extract dialogues about cultural work from formerly colonized peoples from its historical position in relation to former colonial powers. Breaching the dense, opaque tradition of art and social history’s foothold in the West, Conscious Realities’ program Encounter, restructures this discourse between creative thinkers in South East Asia, South Asia, Latin America and Africa, encouraging awareness in Vietnam which binds their cultural and social histories to those within these regions. Its Prod/Ponder residency invites a network of five artists/curators to share the space of production and a lived, creative environment for 1 month. Both components of Conscious Realities are aimed at generating vital exchange, to articulate how diverse mechanisms of social, spiritual, political and economic histories are integrated into the copious manifestations of contemporary art practice.

 

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Unconditional Belief by Art Labor

Unconditional Belief

by

Art Labor

Art Labor is an art collective based in Ho Chi Minh City, comprised of 3 core members, visual artists Truong Cong Tung, Phan Thao Nguyen and curator / writer Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran. Art Labor examines the linked territories between visual arts, social and life sciences. The collective’s practices embrace interdisciplinary means of artistic production, and alternative, non-formal knowledge via artistic and cultural activities.

Art Labor’s Unconditional Belief was an invited project, part of Prod/Ponder of the Conscious Realities program at Sàn Art, granting critical creative support, which enabled Art Labor to extend their hybrid activities, and create a broad spectrum of participants and audience. The collective has collaborated with the Anthropology Department and the University of Social Sciences and Humanity of Vietnam National University. Presentation of the exhibition took place at Sàn Art in 2014.

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In Unconditional Belief, artists Truong Cong Tung and Phan Thao Nguyen examine the vast impact belief has, as an imperative means influencing the many aspects in the history of humanity. It is the faith that drives spirituality, a similar strain of conviction utilized as justification for war, doctrines of systematic hierarchy between groups, or the tenets that form a specific cultural foundation. Both artists reduce the broad topic of belief, specifically probing it in the context of Vietnamese history and culture. The exhibition surveys human acceptance on divine powers or sacred objects in healing sickness, to the implementation of pedagogy as a vehicle to disseminate religious ideas.

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Truong Cong Tung, Journey of a piece of soil 2013 (still) Single channel video: 3:36, color, sound, ed. 3 + 1AP

Truong Cong Tung studies Vietnamese people’s belief in suffering, fate and ideas of the supernatural. Approaching his work like a field anthropologist undertaking an ethnographic study, Truong Cong Tung conducted research in the ‘Magic Garden’ in Long An Province, a private garden open to the public believed to have healing powers. He examined people’s spiritual beliefs, rituals, and practices that were based on faith and not by scientific means. In his research, he discovered beliefs that were bordering on dream-like delusions, used as an effective tool to treat patients by psychiatrists, and rituals of worship to sacred objects believed to grant wishes.

Cong Tung’s field notes transform to drawings, video and sculptural objects. Through his lens, individual or collective suffering is portrayed through physical and mental excavation, and quiet and psychologically profound drawings and text in the form of a book. In Journey of a piece of soil’, the artist paints a termite nest, displayed on a mirrored pedestal, in a sleek, modern environment reminiscent of a club or disco. This slick revision of a customary alter seems to be Cong Tung’s version of a visual query or postulation, one that calls for the transcendence of possibly archaic beliefs, proposing an appeal for modification of spiritual ritual in the present world.

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Truong Cong Tung, installation shot of Journey of a piece of soil, 2014 Object: Termite nest, paint, 38 x 40 x 60 cm
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Truong Cong Tung, Three-staged Reality Vol.1, 2014 (detail) 38 pages: pencil on mylar, plexiglass, leather, 37 x 26 x 1.5 cm

In her work, Phan Thao Nguyen points to the history of modern Vietnamese script, a Romanized alphabet system supposedly developed by 17th century French, Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, marking the end of Vietnamese as pictorial character (the result of 1000 years of Chinese rule of Vietnam) and perhaps foreshadowing a new era of French occupation. Thao Nguyen creates an imagined school named after de Rhodes, and her pedagogy aims to challenge notions of belief.

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Phan Thao Nguyen, ‘To teach’ in ‘Education of a poet’, 2014 Oil on X-ray film backing, 43 x 35.3 cm

Shown in Thao Nguyen’s paintings are the apparitions of the school’s occupants. In a series entitled Education of a Poet, the artist forsakes visual acuity to create spectral, metaphorical forms. Where the nostalgic gestures curtsy to communist propaganda posters, the artist adopts understated manners of surrealism, agitating among other things, scale and isolation for somber, sedated forms. The visual nature of her work takes the disturbing compositions, which include blindfolded heads on a platter, out of trepidation, to mute poetry. Appearing to showcase blindness and illiteracy as real obstacles of learning for pupil and teacher, in Education of a Poet, Thao Nguyen examines a world devoid of literacy and knowledge. She strips away the currency given to the monumental significance of the acquisition of beliefs. Her paintings, whispers of abbreviated challenges to the value of consumption, especially given its kinship with dogmatic doctrines, at the expense of encountering poetry and beauty.

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Phan Thao Nguyen, ‘The illiterates’ in ‘Education of a poet’, 2014 Oil on X-ray film backing, 43 x 35.3 cm
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Phan Thao Nguyen, ‘Playground’ in ‘Education of a poet’, 2014 Oil on X-ray film backing, 43 x 35.3 cm

Conscious Realities and its programming is funded in part by the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands.

Lien Truong is a Vietnamese-American creative and exhibits her artwork in transcultural locations. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 


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