Opening: Tue 09 Sep 2014, 6 pm
Artist talk: Sat 13 Sep 2014, 2.15 pm
Exhibition: 09 – 14 Sep 2014
Vietnam Fine Arts Museum
From the artist:
“Life’s mannequin” is the first solo exhibition of artist Nguyen Khac Chinh in Vietnam. Born in 1984 in Hanoi and graduated from the Hanoi University of Fine Arts in 2006, underwent a process of work, painting into mainstream contemporary art has given me a lot of experience in life and on the art road.
Artist’s statement
My educational and working background, with exhibitions in different forms and working with different media including, among others, installations, performances, video art, lacquer, has given me extensive experience with arts and a way to discover myself into a larger world of paintings, with its misty misery yet attractive beauty made of materials, colors and sublime emotions.
Through my paintings, I want to express my feelings, my thoughts and angles of my soul onto the canvas. From natural landscapes to portraits, from people and their daily activities to refined ideas and vague feelings… I want to express each and every thing through the most personal lens and purest shades.
Exhibition’s preview by Vu Lam
The series are a manifestation of personal narratives. If you look at them thoroughly enough, you will feel the artist’s ambition and desire expressed through the symbols that he wants to develop into some kind of styles. He is ambitious to embrace all of those universal faces out there in the life that he’s living in, especially those of the young generation’s. He paints what he feels by creating multiple unreal faces, all of them alike as empty shells with no sensitivity or emotions. Abstinence and control happening continuously on a figure or a group of figures depicted with skepticism frustrate viewers in a hard to describe way. And it works! On the other hand, there is a clear desire to get his message across and remind individual viewers to stop and look back at their own life, to see whether they have been living it mostly with their true feelings and emotions or mostly like mannequins in this “plastic” era. This even opens up a broader message, that men are being ‘mannequin-ized’ and human qualities are being transformed in human technologies, which in turn are penetrating deeply into how behaviors towards traditions are evolving… And it can be even more powerful and haunting if the ambiguity and skepticism demonstrated through the figures’ gestures and the overall space and ambience of the paintings get deeper into abstract sense and consciousness…
Vietnam Fine Arts Museum
66 Nguyen Thai Hoc St.
Hanoi
Source: Hanoi Grpevine
