The Propeller Group: The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music at James Cohan Gallery
April 8 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 714 9500

In the West, many people are privileged to maintain a distance from the visceral effects of economic and social inequalities. The Propeller Group, however, wants us to confront them. Their work around branding and marketing strategies, notions of nation building, propaganda, and the collective vs. individual, will help viewers consider those systems and recognize how we might be complicit in them and, perhaps, undo them.

Their collective — comprised of core members Phunam, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Matt Lucero — began working together officially in 2006, but had met and worked together in graduate school at CalArts (Nguyen and Lucero) and upon meeting back to their home country of Vietnam (Phunam and Nguyen in 2005). The members, each an artist in his own right, formed the collective to realize ambitious art projects and large-scale productions with Vietnamese artists. Their first solo museum exhibition, featuring seven videos and installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, highlight the importance of the convergence of the fine and commercial art worlds in their practice. The group’s ability to shape shift and code switch among genres, traditions, and cultures from the East and West helps them make meaningful critiques of consumer culture, politics and the effects on the human condition.

As young men coming of age in the ’90s — all three cite hip-hop and graffiti culture as important to their mode — The Propeller Group carry the residue of the social and cultural context of the time. In art schools, scholars tended to focus more on theories like deconstructionism, institutional critique, and identity politics over examinations of the discrete art object. During their time at CalArts, Lucero and Nguyen were students of Daniel Joseph Martinez, whose installation at the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial included distributing admission buttons spelling out “I CAN’T EVER IMAGINE WANTING TO BE WHITE.” Migration is an important influence too: All identify as people of color, Lucero a California native, and Nguyen and Phunam as refugees whose families fled Vietnam during the war.

Guns serve as an important motif in their work, particularly Cold War-era Russian and American assault rifles: the AK-47 and M16. (They’ve even made a feature length film out of montaged YouTube clips, Hollywood films, documentaries, and promotional video about the firearms.) A 21-minute video, The AK-47 vs. The M16 (2015), most recently on view at James Cohan’s Lower East Side location and originally conceived for the 56th Venice Biennale, features a series of blocks made of ballistics gelatin embedded with discharges from each rifle fired simultaneously, and a video of the blast. The video captures the bullets penetrating the gel blocks and colliding with each other. At one point a gun misfires and the discharge creates a smooth trajectory; in another, both guns fire on each other, creating a collision manifesting like ink blots or paint pours. The gel blocks, sealed in resin under vitrines, are often used in ballistics tests and are designed to mimic the qualities of human flesh. While the blocks capture the violence of the blasts and freeze it in time, the effect is diminished after watching the live firing in the video, making the sculptures feel like a redundant let-down. But this can be a shortfall of overtly political art: how to create effective — not overwrought — affect. Works like the sculptures of The AK-47 vs. The M16 or Television Commercial for Communism (2011) fall into such didactic trappings, but that cannot be attributed to the fact that The Propeller Group also has another life in commercial art and advertising. Their work is simply more effective when they collapse the distance between the politics and the person.

Collateral Damage (2015), for example, also mines the theme of guns and violence, but the simple gesture of capturing the pattern of stippling and bullet fragments skipping and tearing across black paper is haunting in its austerity. The Guerrillas of Cu Chi (2012), which uses a propaganda film as part of the installation, is very successful at underscoring the human costs of war. In a darkened room, two videos on opposite walls depict scenes from the Cu Chi district in Ho Chi Minh City where Viet Cong fighters built a complex of tunnels — critical to defeating the US military in spite of its technological superiority. In the black-and-white propaganda film, the narrator describes how the people enjoyed picnicking in Cu Chi, “Until the merciless Americans began dropping their bombs […] on it.” Facing this film, modern day tourists are shown taking photos and selfies at the shooting range that currently stands on the site as captions from the black-and-white film flash across the bottom. The juxtaposition, while seemingly moralistic on the surface, highlights the differences in the way histories are remembered depending on who remembers them.

The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014) is perhaps the group’s most lyrical statement to explore the central concerns of their work. Part of this lies in the aesthetic: The Propeller Group used an “overcrank” technique to shoot frames at a higher rate than normal, allowing the footage to appear like slow motion when played back at standard speed. If you’ve ever seen the movie Chariots of Fire (1981) or nearly any shampoo commercial ever, you are familiar with this technique and know that if done poorly, overcrank can appear hokey and amateurish. The film was originally created for Prospect.3, the third Prospect New Orleans biennial, held from 2014 to 2015, and one wonders: is it the film’s focus on funerary practices in Vietnam and their echoes to those specific to New Orleans, the abundant images of water, references to mysticism, transformation, and change that make it effective, or something else? The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music leaves room for the consideration and contemplation, the joy and sadness — the range of human emotions the world often asks us to elide. Facing the feeling, sitting with the rage, discomfort, confusion or sadness, however, is exactly what The Propeller Group may intend for viewers. These are not the cynical acts of ad men, but the hopeful ones that only artists make.

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March 18 to April 23, 2016
2, 151/3 Đồng Khởi
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, +84 8 3824 8284

For his second show at Saigon’s Galerie Quynh, Hanoi-born, Saigon-based artist Nguyen Manh Hung chose the title “Farmers Got Power,” inspired by the TV show America’s Got Talent. This title sounds strikingly similar to a communist slogan, suggesting the possibility that the artist might be making of a veiled parody of the party line (i.e. a straight faced assertion that the farmers of Vietnam really do hold the power, which would be a laughable claim, unfortunately). But if questioned by a censor, it would be possible to insist on a non-ironic interpretation of the title; in this manner, Hung deploys a cryptic language of doublespeak that makes room for subversive thought with plausible deniability built in.

As the pervasive censorship of artists in Vietnam generally causes many to self-censor for survival, the delicate dance with authorities has become an art unto itself. As Hung explained in a 2011 Independent Curators International interview with curator Zoe Butt: “Censorship has now become one of the mediums for art making. In a way it forces artists to push themselves further and requires them to look for other ways to express their artistic languages and viewpoints.” Hung could be seen doing this in his recent show, which featured paintings, sculptures, and photo-collages that transplant cultural symbols from Vietnam’s past into contemporary contexts. This is a bold thing to do, given that the Communist Party likes to maintain a monopoly on the visual representation of Vietnamese culture, but Hung is able to pull it off brilliantly through his own sly brand of surrealism that resists fixed definitions through sheer open-endedness.

The show is anchored by five trompe l’oeil paintings, all of which feature images of people and animals out of place. In the painting Guard at Night (2016) we see a bored looking man dressed in a bright red uniform of the sort once worn by palace guards at the royal city of Hue. In one hand he holds a halberd, while in the other he holds a chicken on a leash. The bright image of this guard and his bird is flatly overlaid onto a night scene of an airport runway, with the blurry silhouette of a jet preparing for take-off in the middle distance. Similarly, in Le Petit Tirailleur, (2016) a barefoot boy of about 10 casually holds the reins to a giant snail, while bearing in his other hand the five-colored flag of Vietnam, a traditional standard representing the five elements from Chinese medicine and philosophy. As in Guard at Night, the figure and animal are unnaturally lit within their gloomy environment, this time with the flashing lights of a police cruiser glaring ominously in the background.

Because of their bare feet, one might interpret these people as the eponymous “farmers” of the exhibition’s title, perhaps press-ganged into military service, as was the fate of so many generations of Vietnamese farmers throughout millennia of foreign occupation. The coq gaulois was a prominent emblem of the French Revolution, so it’s easy to interpret the animals as an arrow pointing blame for the unequal wealth distribution towards Vietnam’s traditional antagonists: China, France, and the US. (The juxtaposition of a fighter jet and a Vietnamese farmer obviously evokes memories of the ruthless bombing campaign undertaken by the Americans during “The American War,” as it is known here, though planes carry additional personal significance for the artist, whose father was a fighter pilot in the North Vietnamese Air Force.) However, when I first laid eyes on these paintings, the term Hai Lua came involuntarily to mind, which transliterated means “rice farmer,” but is in fact a derogative hurled by city folk at the sort of country bumpkins liable to stand in the middle of the street blocking traffic with their livestock. Vietnam is supposed to be classless according to party dogma, so this subtle reference to class inequality within Vietnamese society might also lead us to a critique of the corrupt party politics that governs the country as a whole, enabling rich industrialists to use bribery to evict the poor and/or pollute the environment in order to increase their already vast fortunes. Such issues feel particularly salient right now, as Vietnam is currently experiencing unprecedented, country-wide protests in response to government inaction over a catastrophic fish kill, presumably caused by toxic waste from a brand new billion-dollar steel mill on the central coast.

There is another animal which appears regularly throughout the show, and that is the giant tortoise. In the modestly sized bronze sculpture Checkpoint (2015), three soldier/farmers pose with weapons atop a giant tortoise as if it were a tank or Humvee. All are shoeless and all wear the traditional conical hat of Vietnam, a combination that makes them look like Viet Cong, the communist guerrillas who fought to liberate Southern Vietnam from the French, the Japanese, and the Americans in turn. However, instead of carrying the rectangular flag of the VC, one holds the five-colored flag, which associates them with a more ancient idea of Vietnam, one that predates the existence of the communist party. If the slow and plodding tortoise is a totem of the VC, and by extension, the party, this hardly seems like a flattering association, although an apt one, given the glacial speed of the communist bureaucracy. On the other hand, it bears noting that slow and steady wins the race, as evidenced not only by the story of the tortoise and the hare, but also by the American War, which North Vietnam and the VC eventually won through an almost 20 year long battle of triage. So, while there may be some genuine national pride at work here, I also detect a cynical attitude towards the still ubiquitous propaganda images that pit Vietnam against the outside world. For those generations born after the war ended, dealing with an infuriatingly corrupt and intractable government is probably much more of a relatable issue than any conflict with foreign powers; in fact, foreign influence is generally seen as desirable by the youthful population that dreams of taking its place on the world stage, a dream crystallized in such TV shows as America’s Got Talent, or it’s local equivalent, Vietnam’s Got Talent.

While the physical works themselves are crafted well enough, it is in their conceptual cargo wherein lies Nguyen Manh Hung’s true strength: combining symbols in such a way that their possible significances proliferate, and if some of those possible readings turn out to be subversive in nature, there is always a patriotic counter-reading available to cancel them out. Given how rarely Vietnamese artists dare to even approach political issues and national symbols, this makes Hung a truly exceptionally character, and one of the most exciting contemporary artists working in Vietnam today.

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A Mercedes just burst into flames, right in the interior middle. Mercedes are kind of universal, right? In movies and on the news you always see members of a junta or cartel kingpins or threatened pro-Western dignitaries or suspicious CEOs riding around in Mercedes. And then you see the blackened husks of those cars in the aftermath of civil strife. They often provide a kind of proxy for the bodies we don’t see on the news. There are, perhaps, burned Mercedes in Syria, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere right now. The fire just kind of leapt up. The space around the car is totally undefined blackness and the flames spread and there’s no sound except for roaring and crackling auto combustion. There are few cuts in the video and you just see the fire engulfing the car as the camera pans back and forth. Pretty quickly it’s an inferno spewing sooty black into the night sky. The video was made in Vietnam, which, along with its neighbors, Thailand and the Philippines especially recently, has experienced more than its share of violence. The tires are burning and the paint is puckering with boils. The camera gets really close, circling the car. Have they drained the oil, the gasoline and other flammables from out the vehicle’s organs? Could it explode? Superflex is from the Netherlands, where you probably see scenes like this far less often. But if they had Mercedes in the 17th century, there would have been Dutchmen torching them. Lawrence Weschler’s essay, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” does a great job at piercing the myth of still reflection in Dutch masterpieces, reminding you that just outside his beautiful paintings Vermeer’s countrymen were conquering the world (including Vietnam) and setting it up for the kind of crises that lead to flaming luxury sedans today. The tires are gone on one side; the thing takes a contrapposto stance in the darkness, fire still chewing at the headlights and guts. It’s still burning when the credits start rolling. All this happened in about eight minutes — is it in real time? How long does it take to completely destroy a car and leave only a charred skeleton on the roadside, rebels trudging past, for civilians to ponder the horror of?  NOAH DILLON

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I once visited a famous American painter, getting old by that time, who had spent his formative artistic years in Paris before returning to the U.S. Commenting on another American artist friend who had decided to remain, he said “—— chose to have an elegant life.”  To be an artist in Paris for the last forty-odd years meant staying to one side of the mainstream, though one remained  intellectually stimulated, current on continental philosophy and literature and in direct communication with generations of important painters, despite their marginalization by international market forces.

In addition, Paris, as we know, is a beautiful place. There is a degree of support for artists–one can have a career there—as well as a nice life: good food, cafés, culture, real conversations, etc. There is also an element of bohemian grittiness. I have visited a number of Parisian artists who go through the overcast, damp winters with a lack of adequate heating in their studios or where they live. The streets of Paris are kept clean but there is car smog, dust, and too much traffic surging in between the grand 19th-century architecture. Artists continue to move to Paris. Its art culture can either be reacted against or immersed in. This differs from the antiquarians and traditionalists that move to Florence, but also differs from those on the Berlin-London-New York circuit where there is showier, ambitious energy.

I recently thought of this while listening to the traffic and peering at the drizzle from the window of my chilly hotel room near Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake. December in Hanoi reminded me of so much of Paris; it occasioned a melancholy so strong that I was surprised that I still had the capacity for it. There are certain similarities to Paris, including the weather, the very good food, the abundant trees, the exhaust fumes and the preponderance of elegantly tied scarves on Hanoians, as well as the widespread availability of fresh flowers and strawberries.

There is also something of a Bohemian tradition, which I discovered during my first visit about four years ago. Just like in the novels of Duong Thu Huong, where the poets end up piled on each other, half-passed out, discussing life, after an all night drinking session, I had come across similar scenes. I mention this because of my reaction to it at the time, which was patronizing. After more visits this attitude has disappeared, replaced by an interest in artists that are able to maintain commitment and energy as their work-life progresses in a country that does much to discourage any kind of free expression. At the same time, looking at Vietnam’s art world, in this particular instance, Hanoi’s, one cannot help, as an outsider, but make certain not unironic and perversely envious observations. With the coming of the country’s membership in the WTO, the period of artistic oppression by the government may end. This is only a possibility. If this does take place, the past dozen-odd years of artistic life here may well look like a similar period in Czechoslovakia in the late 70’s and early 80’s that Slavoj Zizek refers to as a time “when people were, in a way, actually happy.” According to Zizek, this was because their material needs were basically satisfied, anything that went wrong they could blame on the all-controlling government, “and there was the Other Place, (the consumerist west) where one could dream about and even visit sometimes.”

This is a very rough comparison, especially since Vietnam is unique in its long struggle and profound success in conquering its invaders and the large degree of consumerism that has been present for a generation. But it is about to enter warp speed, as its topography becomes infused with tall buildings and western cars at an alarming rate. The government of Vietnam has gone as far as to imprison people that discuss democracy on the Internet. But it has also been a place where many of its artists pursued their work while living something of a traditional artist’s life: productive, genteel, rough around the edges, and attractive to the outsider.

I went out around the city on the gray weekend to document what artists I could find in their Hanoi studios. Vu Dan Tan was the easiest to try and visit, as his studio is the front rooms of Salon Natasha, the gallery run by his Russian-born wife Natalia Kraevskaia, a leading art critic. It is open till all hours and anyone can walk in off the street. The gallery is an old building with a wooden façade that is on one of the busiest tourist streets in the old section of Hanoi. Vu Dan Tan was born in Hanoi in 1946, the son of a playwright. Before the breakup of the Communist bloc, the artist benefited from its version of cosmopolitanism by traveling within its confines.  He spent time in Cuba and Russia, where he studied painting.

There is a lot of origami-type work around the studio, made from found junk, cans, and cardboard, as well as some painterly geometric abstractions on canvases, which I have never seen him do before. Vu Dan Tan seems very shy, but I have stopped by any number of times to watch his work progress or to listen as he plays his old piano. I have enjoyed the changes between a few moments of classical piano, to something a little jazzy to some improvisation, all within a few minutes. He always seems more present in the work than in the room, which is probably why he can tolerate working in such a public environment. The playing and the art are casual in a broken-down, old shoe kind of way, and the trafficking between genres also goes on in the visual work, where the origami masks gravitate towards garment-like sculptures and the geometric grid paintings begin to cross with figures and portraits. Everything here seems sure and yet tentative, constructed delicately from fantasy and tinkering.

I took a motorcycle-taxi down Hai Ba Trung to painter Maritta Nurmi’s house, four kilometers below Hoan Kiem Lake, the southernmost area of the Hai Ba Trung district, well past the expat neighborhoods. It was mostly two-storey buildings after two kilometers, juxtapositions of generically functional modern buildings, Chinese shop-fronts and French colonial houses, mixed up with hovels, barns, and pens. The more expensive, newer housing, is an updated version of the colonial style, but on a bigger scale and very kitschy. This is found mostly in the north of the city.

Hanoi, incidentally, is made up of numerous lakes of various sizes that have a cooling effect in the hot months and are always surrounded by people exercising, playing badminton, and socializing. The lakes are a by-product of the redirecting of the Red River, (Hanoi means “city of the bend in the river”) and areas of it date from times when barriers were erected to keep check on the overflow. I was heading beyond the third circumference, which is less than one hundred years old. The first, where I was staying, is one thousand years old.

All recent houses in Vietnam have tile floors and concrete walls. Shoes are removed at the entrance. Maritta Nurmi served extraordinary bread from a French bakery, and ham, cheese, and coffee. The house is of an unusually articulate modernist design (“All the windows line up from floor to floor,” she said more than once) and had a short deep swimming pool on the ground floor that hadn’t been filled for a long time. “None of the plumbing for it works,” she said. Behind the aqua tile of the pool, on the far wall, she had temporarily installed three large vertical paintings done in copper leaf and paint.

Nurmi came to Hanoi thirteen years ago from Finland, five years after her brother, who opened one of the first expat bars. This was at the beginning of doi moi, the Vietnamese government’s policy of restoration. Nurmi had studied biology in Finland and later attended European art schools. Upon arrival, she enrolled in Hanoi Fine Arts University in order to study lacquer painting, a technique that is a mainstay of traditional Vietnamese painting, though it was only a technique used for decoration until the French crossbred it with pictorial art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts during the late colonial period.

We walked up two floors to Nurmi’s studio, a space that was like the upper region of a light-filled country church. I looked at works in preparation for a spring exhibition. Most of the large verticals were covered in silver leaf and were in the process of oxidizing, one large vertical was finished, with an abstracted stupa-like shape in the center and a few spare marks. It was a very beautiful painting that managed to combine the abundant light of a Western abstraction with a more local painting space of quietly reflective surfaces and detail. Other works that had a more severe horizontal format utilized a funeral urn shape that was applied in close stacks of horizontal black lines. A branch of red berries entered some of the pictures as an additional decorative element. This series reminded me of Edward Gorey’s draftsmanship without the campy overtones.

In general, one does not find a lot of irony in Vietnamese contemporary art; in fact, its outside-the-mainstream genuineness can be a very welcome quality.

I took another motorbike taxi, in Vietnamese a xe om, from Maritta’s in the south up to the Ba Dinh section, north of Hoan Kiem. It was midday on Sunday and the traffic was relatively light. I passed by the Air Force Museum with its front yard chock-full of battered American planes of all sizes. I went to 50 Group 5, Vinh Phuc, the site of the Nhasan studio, a wooden structure that was built according to the plans of a traditional Vietnamese stilt house. Its ground floor is locally famous for being where the first installations and performances by Hanoi’s more advanced artists took place. I lectured there last month on my work. This is also where the young artist Phuong Nguyen Linh has lived for most of her life. Her father is a well-known Hanoi artist who also deals in Vietnamese antiquities upstairs. Linh grew up surrounded by art and artists. She was rejected twice from Hanoi Fine Arts University. But when a large competition, sponsored by the Italian government, was held there that was open to young artists, Linh won first prize: a year’s residency in Rome.

Her room contained some of the props, including a large set of transparent lungs, from a performance she did last year called “Allergy”, which was about her severe asthma. There were two portraits of her by the young artist Nguyen Manh Hung. We then looked at her recent abstract drawings, a number of which were included, along with a large sculpture made from accumulations of tape, in a satellite show at Ho Chi Minh City’s Fine Art Association of young artists from Hanoi that was part of Saigon Open City, Vietnam’s first international exhibition. The drawings were either ballpoint or pencil on what she called “cheap paper” and were reminiscent of the “obsessive school” of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, except these works seemed relaxed and kind of spare. “When do you stop?” I asked her. “Just when it feels right.” Linh said.

The following late morning Pham Ngoc Duong picked me up on his antique motorcycle and we went to have lunch at Nguyen Sinh, a charcuterie that had been in a neighborhood near the cathedral and in operation since 1950. We had paté, and he had the rabbit with mushrooms and I had the steak. Without much prompting he began talking about how in Hanoi there is still a strong cultural tie to the French. And in sensibility: Duong said that he had been “In artist residencies in Berlin, in Japan, in the U.S., but I felt comfortable in Paris and in Lyons. The other places were too different, too clean. The apartments in France are disorganized, you know, stuff is spread around like here, I understand it. In France the toilet stalls are narrow like here, and the living conditions–you put up a curtain and someone works below, and above, behind the curtain, someone else is with his girlfriend, I understand that.” I mention to him that I was writing a piece about how the Hanoi art environment is somewhat French, and how I was slightly considering living here.

Duong’s fiancé is French. He met her in France. We walked through a narrow alley to reach his apartment, in the middle of the old city, which is very busy and noisy. It has assorted rooms on three floors, two of them roof levels, around a staircase. Duong’s place is very quiet. “There is an antique house next door and a pagoda behind me, so they will never put up a big building and it will stay quiet.” I looked at some recent paintings of faces done in an intense monochrome blue. “This is my blue series, it’s for the people of Vietnam. I feel sad for them. You shouldn’t live here, Joe. You like information too much. You will get more information about Vietnam if you live in New York than if you live here.

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HANOI–Areas of the city feature numerous art galleries aimed primarily at the tourist business. Hundreds of insipid decorative paintings are for sale. Oddly, there is more than an occasional almost interesting one. Some of the more adventurous Hanoi artists also produce for the commercial painting market. They adapt (read: sweeten) existing traditional genres, such as happy Vietnamese women in traditional garments under palette-knifed foliage or semi-abstract city churches. In other cases artists who paint for this market seem to have their heart in it. This is a challenge, as one cannot dismiss a painting categorically. One’s critical or ironic distance feels like an impediment, like useless cultural conditioning.

Of the Hanoi artists who participate in the newer forms–socially engaged and politically critical performances and installations–their work is most often and most safely seen in such spaces as the Goethe Institute or l’Espace, part of the French Cultural Center. The Vietnamese government has not been friendly to this work and the artists have felt more comfortable with the extra ring of protection that an international organization provides. The independent Ryllega gallery is devoted to experimental art and operates from funds from The British Council. It was easier for Ryllega to apply to the Ministry of Culture for a license to be a commercial gallery than to try getting approval for an experimental one. That is just how things go here.

One factor that has for the moment taken the heat off controversial local artists is the Vietnamese government’s interest in getting in the WTO. The contemporary art that has received official recognition remains Socialist Realism, a genre that has been combined with a regional technique of lacquer painting that was originally encouraged by the French. Examples adorn the walls of the moribund rooms devoted to contemporary art in the Museums of Fine Arts in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City.

Several Hanoi galleries have shown a commitment to more spirited painting, drawing, sculpture and various mixed media. Salon Natasha is run by a Russian émigré Natalia Kraevskaia and her husband, the artist Vu Dân Tân. Ms. Kraevskaia, who has a PhD in linguistics, recently published From Nostalgia towards Exploration, Essays on Contemporary Art in Vietnam.

Mai Gallery featured many of the Gang of Five painters, a group of neo-expressionists who had a meteoric career. It fizzled with the Asian Financial crisis of 1997. Mai Gallery shows a mixture of commercial paintings along with works by some of the first generation of Vietnamese modernists, including the well-known Nguyen Tu Nghiem, who is in his seventies. His lively work seems to prove (pace Jerry Saltz) that there is still some life in the School of Paris. Art Vietnam gallery is run by the Texan Suzanne Lecht, who has continued to exhibit a multi-generational range of Vietnamese artists as well as some international artists who live in or visit Vietnam.

*

“Hope Box Art Event”, the current exhibition at Art Vietnam features the recent work of Rienke Enghardt of the Netherlands, who has been visiting Vietnam regularly since 1991. Also on exhibit are ten works on paper by the artist Tran Trung Tin. Engehardt’s contribution consists of mixed-media portraits of Tin in homage to the artist, a longstanding friend and mentor. There is also an ensemble from Enghardt’s Weather Report series that assemble, within a single composition, her own drawings in concert with those contributed from a varied assortment of artists she has met in her global travels.

Tran Trung Tin is a self-taught Vietnamese artist who, after serving his country’s revolutionary army in its defeat of the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, attended Hanoi’s documentary film school and briefly became a film star. As the American war expanded, Tin found himself in personal crisis and turned to painting as a way of channeling his feelings of rage and frustration. Stuck in Hanoi as the American bombings continued and in social and official isolation as a result of his making what were considered counterrevolutionary abstract paintings and nudes, he was completely ostracized. He continued to make hundreds of works at this time, mostly on newspaper that reported current events.

The present examples of these works, ‘70-’73, are almost all abstract. Though it is generally held that Tin’s improvisational style is completely original, one suspects that he might have come across copies of Cahiers d’Art or perhaps seen a few of Serge Poliakoff’s works among the remnants of the French occupation. If this were true, it would not at all subtract from Tin’s paintings’ considerable power.  Tin’s very simple, brushy abstractions are comprised of crudely marked lines, dots and dashes in somber but provocatively rich colors. The foregrounded brushwork sometimes plays off the reflected light, text, and imagery of the newsprint. A very basic vocabulary evokes an extraordinarily imaginative spirit enduring a purgatory. There is no sentimentality or self-pity. Their pitch-dark lyricism is reminiscent of the still-lifes that Picasso painted in Nazi-occupied Paris. The paintings speak directly to the present, almost as if they were made for it.

Despite a monograph by the English independent scholar Sherry Buchanan and an exhibition in The Singapore Art Museum, Tin has no international stature. His artistic and historical significance has yet to be recognized by his own government. Tin’s works were loaned for the exhibition by his wife’s gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, where the artist has lived since 1975. The artist has continued to paint.

There are interesting points of comparison between the works of the two artists. Both Enghardt and Tin evidence a shared belief in the expressive qualities the accompany the free use of the hand, evidenced in the brusque swipes that appear, for example, in Tin’s Untitled 1972, an oil on newspaper work the interrupts a web of red ochre and brown lines with bare spaces partially covered with splotchy dots. This same penchant for headlong, handmade materiality is evidenced in Enghardt’sPortrait of Tin, 2005 a collage of acrylic on photo-paper that builds up layers of disparate imagery from cartoons, appropriated photographic imagery from the internet or elsewhere and various handwritten statements that lend a veil of text over some of the picture and, in other places, insinuates itself into existing forms.

Additional similarities include the layering of passages of gestural brushstrokes in Tin’s work and the layering of written texts and imagery in Enghardt’s. Tin is an aesthete, he knows precisely when to stop. Enghardt insists on a material and artistic excess, as if there must be so much going on that we lose track of authorship. Tin’s work dramatizes the centrality of individual experience under extreme duress. It is the work of a romantic attempting self-preservation, at odds with the aims of a collective in desperate defense against an outsized foreign invader.

Enghardt, by contrast, is from the world’s most permissive, and until quite recently, most confidently open society. She exhibits work that reflects her life as a global nomad; a politically aware cosmopolitan. In doing so, Enghardt spills the disorder of a multiplicity of competing versions of the world into her artworks, overwhelming, disrupting and displacing any sense of the individual through her wild mix of influence, collaboration and quotation that overwhelms interpretation.

Though the exhibition honors an artist who struggled to assert his individuality, Enghardt, in praxis, renders the modern ideal of the individual to the periphery. Still, one cannot help but admire the toughness of these works in their articulation of our present cultural and historical situation.

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