TRẦN TRỌNG VŨ

Being the youngest son of poet Trần Dần[1], Trần Trọng Vũ was among the first artists who left Vietnam after Doi Moi[2] to study art in France. When the Berlin Wall fell in winter 1989, he arrived in Paris with only a vest, a suitcase bought on a stopover in Prague of a ‘radiant’ native country buried in the colours of propaganda paintings and an exhausted post-war economy.

The exhibition begins on the ground floor with paintings and an installation. Reflective words are weaved with emotionless faces, on colourful backgrounds, predominantly red and yellow. These images are familiar for connoisseurs of communist countries : they use the same palette and aesthetic of propaganda art, first seen on every street of the Soviet Union in the early 20th century. Vũ calls it ‘the colourful brainwashing campaign’. Those images are still vivid in his memory, even more than 30 years after he escaped his country. However, he may as well have lost memories of homeland, and thus parts of his identity, while the leftover recollections may just have become speculations.

The first floor is an epilogue of his past, and focuses more of Vũ’s observations on France, the foreign surrounding country he would later call ‘home’. One cannot live without the past. For Vu, the past does not stand still in nostalgia. As someone who has detached himself from his own memory, the artist depicts how it fluctuates and grows along with ongoing reality, intertwining two worlds to create fictitious scenes, sometimes absurd.

‘This is a disturbance of time and space, of absurdity and rationality, of possible and impossible’

–Trần Trọng Vũ

The exhibition is a thread through history, navigating between youthful memories, personal projections, and family stories. Everything is placed in a theatrical and contradictory setting, in conflicts between things that have no connection but are necessary to each other. The witty artist documents his experiences with a series of paradoxical symbols and metaphors, both humorous, satirical, and poignant.

Curator: Lê Thiên-Bảo