A work by artist Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine (Photo: VNA)
The exhibition, organized by San Art and the Institut Français in Vietnam, is a gathering of personal poetics by Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Truong Cong Tung.
Poustochkin, a graduate of Ecole Superieure des Arts Decoratifs (School of Decorative Arts) in Strasbourg, France, has been fascinated by Vietnam since 2002.
In 2011, he was awarded a writing grant from the Centre National du Livre to spend a year in Vietnam and create sketchbooks, graphics and videos about his experiments in the country.
Comic-book artist and Art Labor Collective collaborator Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine presents a collection of gouache sketchbooks and video diaries that document memories of, and intimacies with, the sprawling conurbations, sensuous landscapes and nameless faces that the artist has passed in Sai Gon and Buon Ma Thuot over the years.
Truong Cong Tung, a native of Dak Lak province, introduces an installation using a seared tree root, a string of wooden praying beads, and an image of insects on a wing made of steel.
Tung transmits into the space an uncanny body of installation works, utilizing media ranging from gently appropriated or archived organism, a seared tree root, a string of wooden praying beads, a filmic segment of ghostly insects on the wing to an ethnographic text on indigenous beliefs from the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
“The Sap Still Runs” takes its conceptual inspiration from a picture of a felled pine tree in the Cevennes of France, an incident Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine encountered by chance and believed to be a vital resonance with the sight of devalued rubber trees being truncated en masse in the Central Highlands, a cyclical phenomenon he’d learned through Truong Cong Tung’s practice of salvaging and metamorphosing tree corpses into works of art in Gia Lai province, Vietnam.
The exhibition will run until May 21st./.