1 post tagged “contemporary art”

For a while I have been trying to get to know about the contemporary art in HCMC. Since this city is quite cosmopolitan, there's usually a good mix of foreigners based here as well as local and overseas Vietnamese.

Galerie Quynh has put up the year end show - Olio, featuring 8 artists. I especially like works by Do Hoang Tuong (solitary figures with a tiny bird- photo 1), for his strong message of modern life and it's loss of freedom.

I also picked up the exhibition catalogue of his 12 women series by the same gallery, and found the same energy expressed. What was interesting was the installation pictures that could be found on the website, where you see the series layed out, an unfounding series of frozen states of emotions using colours, posturing and objects/animals. I felt some were quite violent, while others have this calmness after the violence effect. It would most certainly have been better experiencing the whole series in one space.

For good balance, I picked up another artist exhibition catalogue - Blue Skies and Fairy Tales by Tran Van Thao. His child like, abstract renderings of pastel range was comforting after those intense emotions. Sadly his 2 pieces in this exhibition did not impress me though. Maybe cos it seems like a work in progress, not quite done, and i especially did not like a white patch on one of the pieces (photo 4).

Just a note about the gallery and it's surrounds. I haven't been to this part of De Tham, and it is a very local area, away from the backpackers' area. I took a walk after visiting the gallery and went through the local market which is likely to be "cleaned up" soon as it is one of the new development sites (still in planning and compensation stages).

Galerie Quynh

65 De Tham, D1, HCMC. T: +84-(0)8-3836 8019. www.galeriequynh.com