BAO VUONG

As soon as our eyes brush against the masses of paint sculpted by the artist, emotion emerges, then overwhelms us with the reflections that follow our movements in the exhibition; we become one with this thick, tumultuous material, by turns abrupt, generous, harsh, subtle and, against all expectations, luminous. In front of the immensity of the horizon where the sea and the sky merge, beauty is revealed, contemplation wins us over, humility prevails.

The night of the paintings of The Crossing brings us back to our existential wanderings, to the trials we have gone through, to the fears of annihilation, to the dark moments that we must cross. If the starting point is the personal story of the artist, the work of light brings us back to our power of surpassing and resilience.

The artist’s ‘crossing’ becomes ours, individual, but also collective. This collective past, like a common sea, carries us with hope towards the horizon, making us oscillate between shadow and light.

Through our comings and goings in the exhibition Coming Through, our intimate experiences take on meaning in the artist’s meditative reverie. The duality—present in everything and in us, in our joys and wounds, in our failures and successes, in life and death—is exhibited in the alternation of dark and luminous materials present in each of Bao Vuong’s monochrome.

Braque said: ‘Art is a wound that becomes light’. With The Crossing, Bao Vuong demonstrates it with accuracy and enchantment.

It was at the end of the 1970s that Bao Vuong, then one year old, was carried by his mother to flee Vietnam still scarred by the war. On a makeshift boat, Bao and 200 others lived for 11 months at sea and in refugee camps, like thousands of other exiles who were later called the ‘boat people’. Many years later, after having been trained at the Beaux-Arts in Toulon (France), Bao returned to his native country. He then evokes the nights of this flight to the sea by painting totally black works with a knife, between abstraction and figuration, between painting and sculpture, between sky and sea.