Young artist’s Nguyen Duc Tu recent works are shown this April at the Gallery Quynh. His photographs and video installation depict a strange, surrealist yet poetic and humorous world.
When you look at Tu's photos you don't know anymore where you are: inside or outside the picture; maybe an actor in a movie of depth. “I like to play with the notion of time”, Tu explains. “Time is very interesting to explore. On the other hand, there are so many ways to explore space: take a plane, a car or even a bike and go. But for the concept of time, we do not have any vehicle to explore it, it is only a dream. There is no time machine… yet!”, he smiles. His video installation aims at creating what could be a way to time travel. He catches visitors on a camera without them knowing it at the entrance and shows the video with a small delay. Visitors have then the surprise to see themselves … as they walked through five minutes ago. “I don’t shoot people’s face. Only their backs. It is a way to say that even though you can see the past, you can’t change it. It’s like something you cannot or should not control”, Tu explains.
Tu was born in Hanoi in 1982. After being kicked out of the Open University, he decided to go for a career in arts, his passion since he was a kid. “Being kicked out of University was the best thing that could happen to me!”, he laughs. Since then, he has participated in many collective exhibitions in HCMC, Hanoi and in Paris. He also went to Korea for a three-month residency and he will take another one in Japan in October this year. The exhibition at Gallery Quynh is his first solo exhibition.
Tu then points at his photographs, produced with the Stitcher software which allows the creation a very wide angle picture by mixing many pictures together. The photos seem to produce unlikely scenes, to project a sense of surrealism. They give way to an infinity of ways to interpret them: they call upon our interior self. “People can see what they want in my photos. These photos are just the medium, the meeting point in space and in time of their own projections and my ideas”, he says. On one picture, you can see a group of bartenders and waitresses holding their trays… in the middle of a hectic traffic jam. Yet, the staff looks serious and would probably be serving drinks to the people stuck amidst the mayhem. On another one, a girl holding a surf board is crossing Dong Khoi street. Here, the message is more social and contemporary as Tu likes to stimulate our reflection. “I am concerned about today’s issues such as global warming, Tu explains. In a way, it is quite a source of inspiration. For example, as a result of global warming, the sea level will rise by one or two meters. For Saigon, it would simply mean being wiped out. But then, there could be nice beaches for surfing!”
Tu has often likened the production of an artist to the keeping of a personal poetry. In his case, his photography is largely influenced by composition of realistic cohabiting with unnatural or unexpected forms. There are, perhaps, for the viewer, the promise of more surprises and more sheer delight as Tu shows in his daring creative work at the Gallery Quynh. “I like to be surprised. I try to integrate this factor in my photos. On this one, my model was posing, wearing a white wedding dress. She plays with multicolour balloons. And as I was taking pictures, a kid showed up and peed against the wall! That could have been a total disaster. But then I thought, well yeah, that’s life. Poetry can only exist if there is a sense of… reality! So I kept the picture of the boy and “stitched” it with the rest of the scene. I think it works quite well!”
To come close to the creativity of an artist like Nguyen Duc Tu allows us to become part of a very special and exciting moment in Vietnamese art. Such an artist seems proof of the undefeatable spirit and power of creativity to burst in the near future in the country.(Photos by Nguyen Duc Tu)
