The exhibition "Endless Festivities" borrows the title of Hemingway's memoir to allude to the enduring vitality of an art form: lacquer painting will always be an "endless festivity" in the flow of traditional Vietnamese painting.
Phi Phi Oanh evokes memories of rural life.
Phi Phi Oanh presented four works from the series that made her famous: Scry, Pro Se, and an installation, A Moveable Feast, depicting Vietnamese meals, both on holidays and everyday occasions. Interested in the theme of traditional Vietnamese culture, Phi Phi Oanh follows the evolution of this culture and participates in that process through groundbreaking creations combining lacquer with new forms of materials.
She emerges as a reimagining of the medium, expanding the expressive scope of lacquer in visual form, reflecting histories of cultural exchange, and placing this material within a broader artistic dialogue context.
Phi Phi Oanh's meals are metaphors for the rhythm of Vietnamese life, an East Asian rhythm governed by the lunar cycle. This time, her work, "A Moveable Feast," is reimagined as an installation: a ceremonial/Tet feast "moves" around the exhibition space, with a robot as its "legs." The integration of technology into lunar-based life reveals the artist's perspective on the process of cultural transformation.
Phi Phi Oanh doesn't confine culture to fixed themes. Images of meals, plates of fish, trays of five fruits, bricks, walls, mats... are symbolic of village culture, evoking nostalgia for the collective atmosphere of Vietnamese life. They reappear in her works, but are always "refreshed" through new materials: lacquer on glass, iron, paper, leather; "looked at again" through reflections on image theory; and "live a new life" in different experiential spaces and with modern technological equipment. "I love the contrast between the simple objects around me - those that are not polished, that receive little attention - and the polished surface of lacquer. Lacquer creates a sense of nobility in the most ordinary objects," Phi Phi Oanh shared.
Lacquer painting on plastic, 60 x 60 cm.
Phi Phi Oanh's painting experiments revolve around the material properties of lacquer, with deep, rich colors and the ever-changing interplay of light on the painting's surface. She depicts the real world in detail through a vibrant yet subdued color palette. Light in her paintings often spreads across the surfaces of objects, giving them both a dense, substantial quality and an elusive, shimmering quality. This approach places familiar everyday objects at the center of a visual world rich in color and light.
Substrate materials, such as glass and metal, also allow light to reflect and spread in different ways. Two paintings in the Scry series place lacquer as a suspended mass between two layers of transparent glass. Light penetrates through the overlapping layers of lacquer, peeling back the structure of the object being depicted. Light gives lacquer new, flexible expressions that are close to the language of contemporary painting.
Nguyen Tuan Cuong and his story from the shadows.
While the world depicted in Phi Phi Oanh's paintings is clear and full of light, Nguyen Tuan Cuong's paintings open up a completely different space. Cuong's paintings often focus on the small corners of traditional Vietnamese houses: a bamboo screen, a window sill, a wooden bed, or a sunlit corner of a porch – spaces devoid of people but full of traces of life. These are places where light appears only faintly and quietly, as if seeping through layers of time.
Nguyen Tuan Cuong has an obsession with light and shadow. All the objects the artist depicts in his paintings are placed within the frame of reference of light and shadow. Light comes not only from bright areas, but also from dark areas, one of the unique advantages of lacquer painting. In Cuong's paintings, light always comes from semi-dark shadows. It doesn't shine directly on the object, but is gathered between layers of dark color, penetrating through many layers of material before reaching the surface. The color palette is deep brown, with thin, transparent layers of lacquer, layered densely and robustly.
Against this material backdrop, the positive light points seem to expand more across the surface, while the negative light areas are held back, suspended in an ambiguous atmosphere of emotion. The creation of space and the mastery of emotion through light is the most prominent characteristic of this series.
"Endless Festivities" is also a new artistic movement by Nguyen Tuan Cuong, following his breakthrough in "Ancient Moon District" in 2024. With this exhibition, the artist has gradually moved away from conventional spaces to enter a space of sensation and memory.
Details in the painting gradually disappear, restoring the free surface of the material, with a few abstract, somewhat surreal rhythms. This is a powerful departure from a realist painter. He drastically restrains detail, bravely blurring the boundaries of architecture and remaining faithful to a transparent style of painting. This combination does not depict space at all, but rather enhances the sense of space and atmosphere on the painting's surface. The few remaining details become hidden points of inner feeling, suggesting a tranquil resting place behind the noise of everyday life.
It is a life that turns inward, withdrawing, metaphorically conveyed through layers of hazy, overlapping memories. The path from the poetic space of "Moonlight in the Old Quarter" to the sensory space of this exhibition must be the path of someone with a thorough understanding of lacquer materials and a passion for traditional painting.
Lacquer painting on wood, 60 x 90 cm. (Photo in the article: Provided by the author)
A striking feature of Nguyen Tuan Cuong's latest series of paintings is that color is perceived through the material itself, rather than being expressed through the material. The physical properties of the material are diminished, and the color of the material is restrained accordingly. The artist focuses solely on the process of handling the material – a monotonous process of traditional lacquer painting techniques, yet one that holds enduring value.
Thin layers of lacquer, carefully applied through multiple coats and grindings, create a distinctive depth of color and a robust texture. The colors then emerge, interacting through each thin layer of lacquer and the patient grinding process. This is a color entirely governed by the artist's thoughts and state of mind, not a realistic color. It contributes to the creation of a more abstract state of space and light in this series, most noticeably in the paintings "Impermanence," "The Wooden Bed," and "A Summer Afternoon." This is also the sweet fruit of a patient approach to lacquer painting.
Placed side-by-side, these two practices demonstrate the vast expressive range of lacquer painting. Despite differences in imagery and setting, both practices begin from a common foundation: traditional lacquerware and the meticulous, painstaking nature of artistic labor.
For Phi Phi Oanh, that foundation became the starting point for experiments in materials and visual structures, expanding the possibilities of materials in new directions. For Nguyen Tuan Cuong, tradition became a means to explore subtle states of sensory space.
One person embraces modern life in lacquer painting, the other patiently delves into the depths of traditional Vietnamese lacquer. One represents a world of objects and events, light and color; the other a space and atmosphere of nostalgia and antiquity.
These two visual worlds can be understood as two sides of the same life: the side clearly revealed in the light of activities and rituals, when everything is laid out before the eyes; and the side withdrawn into the darkness of memory space.
These are also the two rhythms of movement in "Endless Festivities": the rhythm of festivities with the dazzling moments of life outside, and the rhythm of endless contemplation with moments of quiet reflection within.
Between these two rhythms, lacquer – with its layered structure of light and shadow – becomes a special material: capable of both illuminating concrete images of life and preserving the ambiguous and profound states of memory.
“In the lacquer paintings of Phi Phi Oanh and Nguyen Tuan Cuong, the ‘psychological objects’ often seen in some long-standing ‘subjective-abstract’ painting trends may be absent. Conversely, here, especially in Phi Phi Oanh’s lacquer art, one frequently sees very ‘concrete-objective’ objects, even without any ‘decoration’ or ‘painting,’ very real in both form and color—as if all stemming from the thesis: only sensation is the direct object of perception, the world is a totality of ‘ideas,’ ‘sensory complexes,’ subtly acknowledging the existence of objects manifested in sensation, acknowledging that propositions about things can be reduced to propositions about the content of consciousness.”
And it is here that we cannot fail to affirm the role of instrumental elements, which the artist has prioritized applying at the right time, in the right place, and according to their abilities: that is the essence of Traditional Vietnamese Lacquer, the color and quality of the lacquer here - indeed - has transformed from the color of materiality into the color of consciousness, the color of spirit… And accordingly, reality in the art of Phi Phi Oanh and Nguyen Tuan Cuong also transforms from descriptive reality to cognitive reality, the reality of the spirit,” Quang Viet - art researcher.
Source: https://baophapluat.vn/hai-hoa-si-hoi-he-mien-man.html
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