Asian Art News: Small and Miniature Paintings by the Masters at Minh Chau Art Gallery
This exhibition brought together a wide variety of work by some of the most prominent names in the 20th century Vietnamese art world. There is a timeless quality to many of the works on show whose spirit-if not style-is to be seen clearly even in a great deal of the work of the most recent generation of artists.
This exhibition brought together a wide variety of work by some of the most prominent names in the 20th century Vietnamese art world. Artists such as Bui Xuan Phai (1921-1988), Nguyen Tu Nghiem (1922-2016), Nguyen Sang (1923-1988), and Nguyen Trung (B. 1940) have become well-known regionally and internationally. Perhaps less well-known to collectors in the broader art scene are artists such as Nguyen Phan Chanh (1892-1984), Tran Van Can (1910-1994), Duong Bich Lien (1924-1988), Nguyen Tien Chung (1914-1976), and Luu Cong Nhan (1931-2007). During the past two decades, however, as Vietnam has opened up to the world, works by these artists have gradually made their way into innumerable collections.
The connection within this group of artists with the exception of Luu Cong Nhan and Nguyen Trung is that they were all students at the highly influential École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, which opened its doors in Hanoi in 1925. As a colonial art institution, French painting, the School of Paris in particular, and European in general were the basis of the curriculum. The influence of this school and the artists who attended it until it closed after World War II is still felt, even among the youngest artists working in Vietnam today.
Modern and contemporary Vietnamese painting has been dominated by figurative and landscape painting and drawing. And so it is the case with the work on display in this exhibition. Of the work that can safely be referred to as truly miniature, it is that of Bui Xuan Phai that stands out. Portraits of his son (gouache) and of the poets Quang Dung (gouache) and Ho Xuan Huong (colour pencil) are striking as strong character studies and in their attention to detail. Phai. famous for his paintings of Hanoi’s streets and traditional Vietnamese opera, has been thoroughly imitated by numerous artists over the years. No one, however, has achieved the subtlety of vision that Phai did during his life.
Nguyen Tien Chung, who specialized in woodcuts, lacquer, and silk painting, was clearly an artist who had great empathy for working people. In his small drawings of people at work and at rest, Chung reveals his subjects as people with immense character and human dignity. His eye for detail-the strength of the farmer’s hands holding a hoe, the subtlety of a woman’s smile, and the cocky angle of a hat-adds more to his studies of their characters. Where Chung succeeded in capturing the integrity of his subjects, Nguyen Tu Nghiem has long been famous for capturing the spirit of Vietnamese society through his singular attention to its traditional arts and culture. and doing so in a manner that speaks to the modern world.
For people who have been witnesses to the rapid changes in Vietnam since the 1980s, even the earliest works will not be out of place today. Indeed there is a timeless quality to many of the works on show whose spirit-if not style-is to be seen clearly even in a great deal of the work of the most recent generation of artists.
The lyrical and romantic qualities that are so singularly present in much of contemporary Vietnamese art have their roots in the work of these masters’ understanding of the best qualities of European painting and Vietnamese tradition. For those critics who feel that modern and contemporary Vietnamese painting is a mere rehashing of French art, then they would do well to take a much closer look at the work of these artists and their traditions. They speak to the heart of a culture that seeks its unique place in the contemporary art scene.
Ian Findlay
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