A2Z Art Gallery presents “Tôi & Moi” , the first solo exhibition by Trần Trọng Vũ in Paris, showcasing selected artworks from 2002 to 2022.
Being the youngest son of poet Trần Dần, Trần Trọng Vũ was among the first artists who left Vietnam after Doi Moi to study art in France. When the Berlin Wall fell in winter 1989, he arrived to Paris with only a vest, a suitcase bought on a stopover in Prague of a “radiant” native country buried in the colors of propaganda paintings and an exhausted post-war economy.
The exhibition begins on the groundfloor with paintings and an installation. Reflective words are weaved with emotionless faces, on colorful backgrounds, predominantly red and yellow. These images are familiar for connoisseurs of communist countries : they use the same palette and aesthetic of propaganda art, first seen on every street of the Soviet Union in the early 20th century. Vũ calls it “the colorful brainwashing campaign”. Those images are still vivid in his memory, even after more than 30 years after he escaped his country. However, he may as well have lost memories of homeland, and thus parts of his identity, while the leftover recollections may just have become speculations.
The first floor is an epilogue of his past, and focuses more of Vũ’s observations on France, the foreign surrounding country he would later call “home”. One cannot live without the past. For Vu, the past does not stand still in nostalgia. As someone who has detached himself from his own memory, the artist depicts how it fluctuates and grows along with ongoing reality, intertwining two worlds to create fictitious scenes, sometimes absurd.
The exhibition is a thread through history, navigating between youthful memories, personal projections, and family stories. Everything is placed in a theatrical and contradictory setting, in conflicts between things that have no connection but are necessary to each other. The witty artist documents his experiences with a series of paradoxical symbols and metaphors, both humorous, satirical, and poignant.
Curator: Lê Thiên-Bảo
1. Trần Dần (1926-1997) is among the first writer who particiapted early in the Revolution in Vietnam. He had been a member of the Vietnam Communist Party since 1949. His writings are direct, intense and progessive. After the 1954 Dien Bien Phu victory, he resigned from the Party and joined the Nhan Van Giai Pham movement in 1955, in order to demand creative freedom for artists. Due to dissent, in the same year, he was imprisoned for 3 months. Since then, Tran Dan's career and family have suffered many ups and downs. To this day, Tran Dan's work is still classified as a work that requires strict censorship before being published in Vietnam.
2. Doi Moi is a movement similar to the Economic Reform (1978) in China and applying Lenin's model of NEP (1921), General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh initiated the implementation of the 5-Year plan from 1986-1990 to comprehensive economic, political and social reform with the goal of creating a "socialist-oriented market economy".
