BAO VUONG

Nước was the first word Bao uttered, at the age of one and a half, in the boat on which he and his family had been adrift for several days, with no food, no engine, no drinking water, at the very moment when a cloud finally poured its long-awaited rain on the boat and saved the lives of the survivors.

Nước was the cry of a child who is going to ‘live’. Today, it is also the cry of an artist who bears witness to the many geopolitical, migratory and ecological issues linked to this resource that is essential to the planet, and around which many conflicts and humanitarian threats loom. Through the organic and poetic contemplation of his sensitive gesture, he invites us to re-examine the intimate, natural and ancestral links that bind us to our environment.

Nước also means country in Vietnamese.

Nước means both what separates and what is separated, the oceans that isolate and keep apart countries, peoples and their cultures. But the water of these seas is also what allows us to meet up, to find each other again, to make our way towards each other. Before it, each of us must find the courage to move forward despite the waves and storms, and overcome the distance that still separates us from the shore, from rest, from a new land.

Through the evocative power of her canvases, Bao reminds us that while the sea seems to divide the world into several