Galerie Qu\u1ef3nh<\/strong> (118 \u0110\u01b0\u1eddng Nguy\u1ec5n V\u0103n Th\u1ee7, \u0110a Kao, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City) Oct. 20\u00ad \u2013 Dec.12, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this fervent age of over-exposure on social media, mystery is a rare commodity. Will Thurman\u2019s solo exhibition presents an intriguing scenario by requesting its visitors to leave their phones sealed and guarded at the reception desk \u2013 meaning, no photography is allowed. Prior to arriving at the show, even the name Will Thurman and his work remain an enigma to most. The gallery released zero photos of the artist\u2019s artworks and a casual audience would be hard pressed to find a professional description of his biography anywhere by Googling. Will Thurman is a 31-year-old artist from New York, who has been living in Vietnam\u2019s cities and countryside for 10 years and is fluent in the language. It was his wish that no photography be allowed, \u2018to preserve the integrity of the artworks\u2019. This is his first major public exhibition, a culmination of 5 years of intensive painting,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In place of a standard essay, we have this cryptic passage on the gallery\u2019s website:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cGalerie Quynh presents: Basic questions, naturally, plague one\u2019s mind: who is Will Thurman? Is he (or she) someone famous to have prominent writers such as Adam Gopnik and David Rieff writing about him? I was curious. Truth be told, the \u2018no-phone\u2019 request did take me aback for a few seconds \u2013 it was the first time Galerie Qu\u1ef3nh has made such a request in their 17-years in Ho Chi Minh City. My initial bewilderment yielded as a glance through the gallery\u2019s ground floor prompted genuine delight. Stepping through the entrance, occluded by silky grey curtains, one is relieved at the sight \u2013 an exhibition of painting, after all! One of the paintings here is titled \u2018Through the Door stands a Dream\u2019 (2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, the Thurman puzzle did not abate. \u2018Curiouser and curiouser!\u2019, I think, looking at the Vietnamese words on many of these paintings. Is this Will Thurman actually Vietnamese? For the manner in which the inscriptions are employed betrays the mind of someone who has been raised and\/or living in Vietnam for years, to the extent that their messages connote social observations familiarly dear to a native local.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For one, their vivid colors definitely gladden one\u2019s eyes and heart \u2013 Cy Twombly, Philip Guston, R. B. Kitaj, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning are some of the names referenced in the pages penned by the aforementioned writers about Thurman\u2019s paintings. Their flat pictorial, even artless portrayals of animals and men and hybrid creatures, vehicles and buildings and assembly lines, fetuses and soldiers, blenders and boom box and cameras, Pope and Egyptian deities, among myriad others, in a seemingly ad-hoc manner towards which one\u2019s mind is rather stupefied to make any<\/em> sense of what it all means<\/em>, prompted me to hastily refer to the exhibition\u2019s map. In it, the works\u2019 titles reveal themselves to be quite forthright, if not wittily earnest. Consider one: \u2018There are men who make people kiss their hand. I\u2019d rather take the chair. And somehow deforestation largely goes unnoticed.\u2019 (2017). Or \u2018Pain hurts less when the source is obvious\u2019 (2019), and \u2018She thinks one thing, he thinks another. But he\u2019s the one who has to walk home alone at night.\u2019 (2015).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The show\u2019s map also reveals that there are, astoundingly, 103 artworks in total. Whereas the gallery\u2019s mezzanine displays nine thematically white, medium-sized paintings, nothing prepared me for the visual onslaught awaiting in the two rooms on the second floor. The one adjacent to a balcony houses large works of 185 x 200-300 cm, mounted very closely together as if we are looking at one continuous Mexican mural and with their resplendent colors depicting rather strange and surreal imageries. The small back room, on the other hand, contains around 50 paintings of various sizes in salon-style hanging which, effectively, leave you rather speechless by the sheer cacophony of it. All the while, more works are placed on the gallery\u2019s vintage lift area, hallways and ledges on the stairway\u2019s landings. The curation of which was completely entrusted to Quyhn Pham, the gallery founder: \u2018Regarding this idea of his five-year output, I did not want to install the show chronologically. I wanted it to reflect this sort of non-linear trajectory of Will\u2019s career\u2019, she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not unlike a modern take on Aesop\u2019s fables, was my impression. Case in point, we have works with self-explanatory titles such as \u2018Pig in guillotine\u2019 (2019), \u2018Pigeon in shackles\u2019 (2019), and \u2018Cow in noose\u2019 (2019); though as their names infer, the tales of these creatures in Thurman\u2019s depictions are more akin to Giambattista Basile\u2019s fairytales in nature than Disney\u2019s polished omission of grotesque details. Traces and fragments pulled from the chaotic fabric of reality are ever-present in his seemingly benign, deceptively cheerful images that range from the mundane to the absurd. On \u2018Rescue\u2019 (2019) and \u2018Fall\u2019 (2018), full quotes from Vietnamese news are recited word for word, reporting deadly accidents involving fishermen and a construction worker respectively. Accompanied by the artist\u2019s loose, almost dreamlike drawings, the gravity of those situations is as downplayed as (if not accentuating) the detached diction employed by newsmen and accordingly, our desensitized reaction to reading them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Thurman\u2019s cryptic visuals can pose as a challenge to lightning understanding on the viewer\u2019s part, it is his agile incorporation of the written and the painted in many works that to me, yields an inviting gateway into his acute pathos. On \u2018Broken record\u2019 (2017), he muses \u2018The wisest choice was leaving \u2013 [maybe, now beginning seeing the merits of staying] because what is left behind will remain\/lifting heavy things can strain the back.\u2019 At this stage, as you can tell, words and images for this artist are inseparably of equal introspection \u2013 the drawings are as wildly imagined, and yet also thoughtfully constructed as their titles and scribbles are concise and biting. I was particularly drawn to \u2018Savagery\u2019 (2020), belonging to the previously described \u2018white room\u2019, in which the directly translated Vietnamese \u2018Man r\u1ee3\u2019 takes upper-center stage on a spare yet cutting composition: who knows! a singled-out word surrounded with animal figurines and blotted out contours of dominating, shadowy men can suggest confrontation with [the history of] humankind\u2019s dark nature. \u2018Would everything change if these works were altogether left \u2018Untitled\u2019?\u2019, I asked myself at some point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As somewhat (or initially) confusing, complex and even sensorially convoluted these paintings are, in the end, they truly and effectively bespeak what the exhibition\u2019s title connotes: \u2018Life Paintings\u2019, which one can also interpret as \u2018painting of\/about life\u2019. Now, how can anybody possibly capture the stories and meaning of life in its entirety, lucidly, wholly, truthfully \u2013 a perennial quest that every writer, filmmaker, artist, philosopher can relate to and has been striving for? It forever remains revealing yet elusive, perceptible yet layered, quotidian yet holding unsuspected (even uncalled-for or shocking) surprises \u2013 whose qualities I believe, are abundantly transparent in Thurman\u2019s works as showcased in this show. One is free and welcomed to leave this show feeling perplexed, beckoning the urge for a revisit. As I stepped out onto the gallery\u2019s balcony on the second floor for some fresh air, the sounds\u00a0coming off the\u00a0street suddenly took over \u2013 of boys and girls from the secondary school opposite pouring out after class, of motorbike honks and engines reverberating loudly, laughter and chatter echoing up and filling this colorful facet of urban Saigonese landscape \u2013 I found myself smiling, \u2018Such is life.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Quyen Hoang Will Thurman \u2018Life Painti … Continue reading
<\/em>An attack on the senses, a spectacular, a word of warning.
<\/em>A Great Plague
<\/em>of serene terror
<\/em>of willed innocence and candied Errors.
<\/em>Of cows and rats and pigs and pigeons and machines
<\/em>that fail to gauge us.
<\/em>and Uncle Hu\u1ec7.
<\/em>Things balanced on heads at some given time
<\/em>but first titles that transmute as poetry or rather erratic
<\/em>prose
<\/em>cut-stitched to stifle the glitches of reality
<\/em>or waking dreams \u2013 or live visions?
<\/em>Whatever crude cacophony
<\/em>An outside world \u2013 the vulgar menace
<\/em>Plays mental tennis with our inner strength
<\/em>just for the thrill that weird pleasure
<\/em>Squandering time (depending on the weather)
<\/em>Take baby steps since the bridge self-shatters
<\/em>and the boat self-sinks and the boat self-sinks
<\/em>And certain drugs don\u2019t require direct administration.
<\/em>Enter at your peril
<\/em>And hold fast to stir still.
<\/em>Through the Door stands a Dream
<\/em>of the Noon variety.
<\/em>\u2014 (re)arrangement by Th\u00e1i H\u00e0, words appropriated from Suzanne Br\u00f8gger, Adam Gopnik, Nguy\u1ec5n-Ho\u00e0ng Quy\u00ean, Quynh Pham, David Rieff and the artist.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Installation](\"https:\/\/www.randian-online.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Unknown.jpeg\")
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