Thinking Pictures

This exhibition review was originally written for The Word HCMC magazine, and published in June 2011. This is the unedited version:

Saigon-born Tomas Vu-Daniel took care of American GI’s surfboards in Da Nang, before moving to the US at the age of 10. His experience sanding and shaping surfboards haphazardly helped him to become a craft-rich painter and printmaker. The skills of smoothing wood are visible in this exhibition, where we can see impeccable layers of ultrafine wood designing shapes of future spacecrafts or blooming flower patterns across the surfaces of 35 paintings.

Now an acclaimed art professor at Columbia University, Vu-Daniel is back in his hometown for his first solo exhibition here. The title Flatlands bears no relation with a similarly titled short story, rather, it is closer in its remit to Thomas L. Friedmann’s The World is Flat, a book that examines the advantages of living in a globalised age.

Vu-Daniel wants to evoke the sensation of dislocation with this series of intricate collages. He calls them ‘Visionary paintings of the future.’ although he makes no attempt to proselytise about his predictions of what lies ahead. One singular benefit of visual art as a means of communication is that the meanings are open for discussion, rather than limited by more literal modes of expression. Viewers may take a gloomy standpoint and see in these artworks a dark future in which technology and nature drift apart, or they may interpret the highly strung beauty of the artworks as a celebration of the bounty of possibilites and ideas that will overlap us in a plural world.

The series started three years ago and during the creative process the artist started to develop the imagery into an animation. But art doesn’t always work out as the artist plans it to, and the process of creation took a turn. A prolific turn.  Flatlands is a well-travelled collection of ‘chapters’ spanning nearly 400 artworks.

Of these, 35 collages on paper are on display in Galerie Quynh, neatly arranged by background colour. Black, grey and white backgrounds, according to the artist, reference Dante’s journey to the depths of the inferno, to which the optimistic spectators can give a luminous ending, enjoying the bright paintings on the top floor. On their part, conspiracy theorists and digiphobes can work at stretching the mantle of doom onto the mash-up of images in the collages: rigid lines, space debris, organic flotsam and enough empty space to give room to inanimate isolation can feed the imagination of a greenhouse full of scaremongers.

The collages are unusual in that they feature laser cut wood and screenprinted card, all hand finished with ink and paint. Unlike the early collage art in vogue last century, these pieces feature no newspaper cuttings or photographs, but it’s the first time since Picasso and Braque’s use of furniture laminate that I notice the use of wood used as paper. The textures are subtle, but satisfyingly chewy. In itself, the technique of collage constitutes a scrapbook of sources. Here the raw materials are limited to give aesthetic unity, but the graphics chosen could be a hoarder’s treasure: botanical drawings, space travel photographs, blueprints, textbooks, catalogues and other documents have generated illustrations adapted and re-assembled into panoramas of abstraction.

The superb crafting, considered colour scheme and laborious care make these works quietly beautiful. The detailed drawings they contain are a journey of discovery. I bet this is a great show to take children too. They would find hidden monsters and defuse the suggestive theme of purgatory and damnation. This exhibition gives pause for thought and playtime for eyesight.

About the exhibition: ‘Flatlands’ by Tomas Vu-Daniel is on at Galerie Quynh, 65 De Tham, District 1, HCMC, until the 4^th June 2011. www.galeriequynh.com