Image: Khanh Xiu Tran – 9 Parts (No.5)
22nd June and 5th August 2011
Rory Gill Fine Art is to present the first major show of contemporary and experimental Vietnamese Art in London.
This inaugural exhibition, titled ‘Nh?ng chân tr?i không có ng??i bay – Skylines without Flying People´ is curated by Linh Phuong Nguyen, and brings together eight emerging and established artists who live and work in Hanoi. This city, with its unique history, people and spaces, is the unifying current that runs through the works. The exhibition features paintings, photography, installation art, video art, a video compilation of performance art and a number of documentary films.
A curator’s talk by Linh Phuong Nguyen on Contemporary Art Practise in Vietnam will be held at Asia House on Friday 24th June at 6.45pm
Image:Khanh Xiu Tran – 9 Parts (No.2)
Hanoi with its unique history, people and spaces, is the unifying current that runs through the works. We see it in the many faces and bodies of the local Vietnamese photographed by Khanh Xiu Tran; in Bill Nguyens complex sites of memory and minimalist landscapes; in the static yet conceptually dynamic and transitory installations works by Linh Phuong Nguyen and An Huy Nguyen.
Image:Tuan Mami – the cover No.1 (250x150cm) 2009
Curious, overflowing and spare, the canvases of Tuan Mami animate a conversation on the tensions between censorship and revelation.
Image:Sunrise on China Sea, 2009, by Nguyen Manh Hung, oil on canvas, 200 x 100cm
Nguyen Manh Hung has become a major influence in the current art scene in Vietnam since graduating from Hanoi Fine Arts University in 2002. A self taught artist composer, and multi-disciplinary artist, Hungs fine tuned and bizarre paintings take to the air, charting out incisive portraits of Vietnam now.
Image:Grasslands by Jamie Maxtone-Graham, C-type, 30 x 45 inch
Jamie Maxtone-Grahams latest series “Flora and Fauna” are deceptively complicated images; simply and seductively beautiful but layered in between the leaves are ideas of perception, of gaze, of the other and subsequently of self. Nguyen Trinh This sound and video installation Unsubtitled offers a haunting and defiant testament to the power and fragility of Hanois experimental art scene. Thi creates an ethereal portrait of this time in Hanoi, and of the flying people who inhabit it.
Published twenty years after scribbled into Tran Dan’s dusty notebooks, our title poem is one of fifty-odd mini poems, many of which are experimentations with sound and meaning, often attempting to create sounds that have no meaning at all. This collection, evidence that the author continued to write novels and poetry under intense repression, is inspiring. In his radical faithfulness to portraying his own version of the world, this is a poem of hope, not despair. Like Tran Dan, the band of artists in this exhibition are pushing the limits of expression in Hanoi, opening up space for the imagination, in the present day and in the future.
RORY GILL FINE ART
Rory Gill Fine Art is a London based gallery that specialises in contemporary Southeast Asian art, exhibiting and promoting the very best contemporary art from across the region. Many of the best artists are working in new media, installation and performance art and these practises will feature strongly alongside the more traditional art disciplines.
Our goal is also to cultivate inter-cultural awareness and dialogue and we are looking to offer our first London residency for a Southeast Asian artist in 2012. Rory Gill Fine Art also has a very strong social interest and in 2011 established a fund to provide support and resources for the creation of new works by artists in Southeast Asia. We aim also to work with and offer help and funding to community projects in our represented artists’ native countries.
