Review of ‘Điềm Mờ (Opaque Signs)’ at Sàn Art
Fundraising show of light-based installations in Ho Chi Minh City
By David Willis
Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan, ‘Untitled (“Another life in which we find love”)’, 2019, neon light installation. Image courtesy of Sàn Art.
The non-profit art organisation Sàn Art, established in 2007 by the Vietnamese-American artist Đỉnh Q. Lê, has proven to be a leading institution in Vietnamese contemporary art, particularly through their residency programs and educational initiatives. Having morphed repeatedly over the years, they launched their fourth iteration in 2018: an apartment in the Millennium Masteri building in Ho Chi Minh City’s District Four, where they removed some walls to create a small but elegant exhibition space.
Since government support for contemporary art in Vietnam is practically non-existent, Sàn Art has sporadically used fund-raising exhibitions to finance their programming, and so the exhibition ‘Điềm Mờ (Opaque Signs)’ was conceived as a fundraiser in which artists who have collaborated with Sàn Art in the past were invited to donate artworks, or concepts for artworks, for which Sàn Art would pay the fabrication costs. The show is co-curated by the Sàn Art team, made up of the designer Nhật Q. Võ, the writer Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên, and the curators Vicky Đỗ and Mary Lou David. Interestingly, it features only light-based installations: a medium chosen for its ubiquity within the Vietnamese landscape, where LEDs and neon lights are frequently used in commerce, religion and government propaganda.
It begins with a work by Nguyễn Phương Linh titled ‘White Mist in Foreign Country’ (2019), priced at USD6,000, consisting of a photograph UV printed across PVC strip curtains, installed so as to separate the foyer from the main space. Lit from above with pink LED lights, the plastic curtains evoke a bleak industrial setting, while the image depicts a Vietnamese esthetician applying fake eyelashes for a white client in a beauty parlor somewhere overseas. The juxtaposition of beauty parlor and abattoir is chilling, and the migrant woman in the picture becomes a shadow that we can walk through, like a ghost, as we enter the exhibition.
Trương Công Tùng, ‘A Portrait of Absence’, 2019, installation. Image courtesy of Sàn Art.
At one’s feet lies the installation ‘A Portrait of Absence’ (2019), priced at USD3,500, by the artist Trương Công Tùng: a dilapidated propaganda poster laid on the floor, onto which the artist has projected his own text. Words scroll across the poster from right to left, reminiscent of the machines used to display propaganda slogans. The text reads: “I have heard people say: My eyes are deceiving, forgetting, not knowing the truth.” The quote is from the French missionary Jacques Dournes, attempting to capture the world view of a certain tribe in the central highlands of Vietnam. Coming from the suspect account a foreign coloniser, the quote is transformed into a post-colonial critique, since the Vietnamese government still uses propaganda posters of the sort seen here to exhort minority hill-tribe groups to culturally assimilate into Vietnamese society.
The artist Phan Thảo Nguyên also appropriated a relic of state power: a street decoration in the form of a white dove, which she salvaged in the aftermath of a new year celebration. Titled ‘The Rise’ (2016) and priced at USD4,000, the dove is illuminated from within, but the light keeps flickering on and off, ironically undermining the triumphant symbolism of peace and prosperity. This work and the installation by Trương Công Tùng are the only ones to incorporate found objects, with all the other works in the show being brand new and produced in 2019 with San Art’s support.
Continuing with the political theme was an installation by Đỉnh Q. Lê, titled ‘Idolatry’ and priced at USD9,000, featuring the neon words “Vĩ Đại! Muôn Năm!” (meaning “Monumental! Long Live!”) mounted in the centre of a hollow metal frame. The frame strikes a humorous tension between the industrial and luxurious, with its simply formed sides terminating in filigreed, rococo style corners, resembling the tacky embellishments endemic to the mansions of Vietnam’s nouveau riche. By taking a bombastic slogan typically engraved on national monuments and placing it within a bourgeois frame, Lê highlights the cynical double-think that justifies extreme wealth disparity in an ostensibly communist society.
Dealing with spirituality are the works of Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan and Orawan Arunrak. Nguyễn’s work, priced at USD2,500, is the more visually complex of the two, featuring the neon silhouette of a figure waving goodbye, along with the words “Hẹn nhau kiếp sau” (meaning “See you next life”). By contrast, Arunrak’s work, priced at USD3,500, is simply a strip of neon text, reading “The light of the blessings keeps increasing in size”; a line of poetry by the artist, inspired by a man who gathers melted wax at a temple in Bangkok, recycling it into new candles to sell at the same temple.
Ly Hoàng Ly, ‘boat-home-boat’, 2019, lumiled light, iron. Image courtesy of Sàn Art.
Amid yet more wall-mounted neon and LED text pieces, a sculpture by Ly Hoàng Ly stood out on account of its non-reliance on the written word. Priced at USD7,000 and titled ‘boat-home- boat’ (part of the ongoing series ‘0395A.DC’, initiated in 2011), the work resembles the grilles placed over windows to stop burglars, except that instead of metal, this grille is made from LED lights, with a decorative pattern of interlocking boats and houses. Hanging perpendicular to the wall, it becomes an architectural fragment floating free from its moorings, suggesting permeability instead of security, and encapsulating the spirit of the show as a whole: a flickering existence in a state of eternal flux.
Điềm Mờ (Opaque Signs) runs at Sàn Art from 17 December 2019 to 22 January 2020, and opens daily from 4pm to 7.30pm. For more information, visit san-art.org.
