Asian Art News, 1999
By Ian Findlay
In a rush to modernity, many contemporary Vietnamese artists have discarded their nation’s past. Its legends, myths, cruelties, and inequities do not inspire them. But this is not so for Hanoi-born lacquer artists, Bui Huu Hung. His art digs deep into the past in order that it may reflect the present. Hung bolds up a variety of mirrors, sometimes clear, sometimes opaque, in which his often sad narratives connect.
In the rush to modernity, there are many contemporary Vietnamese artists who have discarded their nation’s past. Its legends, myths, culture, cruelties, and inequities do not inspire them. It is the commotion and cacophony of today’s cities that attracts and compels them to make art that is perceived as modern. In part, this is driven by the need to make art that will be accessible to an international market. But there are contemporary artists such as Phan Cam Thuong, Nguyen Thanh Chuong, Cong Quoc Ha, Hong Viet Dung, and Bui Huu Hung-whose work, in a variety of media, is steeped in Vietnamese culture and the traditions of village life. It is this that lends itself to the unique artistic identity of these artists, one so different from that of their contemporaries both at home and abroad.
Bui Huu Hung, born in Hanoi in 1957, is exceptional among these four artists. His lacquer painting, as well as being very different in mood, display not only his concern with the past and its traditions, but also how the past and the present are revealed through each other. Hung’s vision hovers between realism and expressionism, touched by an engaging minimalist abstraction of background. On the surface his narrative is clearly directed. On this Hung fashions his elusive portraits, still lifes, the clash of the spiritual and the traditional, social tensions, and village scenes. He achieves his revelations with a striking subtlety that initially, to the eye, is direct, even formal in its presentation, much like posed photographs in historical albums. There is a certain haziness to his overall image: here is a visual magician playing with time and space. The seamlessness of his work lends it the appearance of effortless accomplishment. But this ease belies the skill and contemplation behind each piece. His “way of transforming lacquer into incarnations of spirits, of making lacquer the vehicle for the appearance of beings, is what makes Hung’s work so contemporary and so radical,” writes art historian Dr. Nora Taylor in a recent catalogue essay on the artist’s work.
But lacquer is not an easy medium with which to work, and even Hung as a specialist hesitates when discussing its complexities. Lacquer requires patience, skill, a knowledgeable and intelligent approach to the subject and the manipulation of color, and the making of an image that will have meaning beyond cultural boundaries. It requires dedication to get things just right, some thing that often seems to be missing in the art of many artists working in other media. You cannot rush lacquer or the medium will refuse to yield its secrets. For Hung, who works slowly, chiefly at night and mostly on large pieces, “lacquer represents a tradition as I am influenced by the pagoda work in lacquer as well as the work of traditional village artisans.” At the same time, Hung’s use of the medium connects him directly to the 20th century masters of Vietnamese lacquer art, such as Nguyen Gia Tri (1910-1993), Tran Van Can (1910-1994), Nguyen Sang (1923-1989), Nguyen Tu Nghiem (b.1922), all of whom, though familiar with the work of the eminent Western artists of their day, stepped back to make work that would be uniquely Vietnamese. For them, as for Hung, the use of lacquer did not signal a complete rejection of Western aesthetics. They rejected the imposition of models and media. To make unique Vietnamese art they understood that they must use their own media.
As the artist Le Thiet Cuong notes in his introduction to the catalogue for Hung’s latest show at Hanoi’s Apricot Galley and Hong Kong’s Plum Blossoms, Hung “has embarked on a risky venture. Indeed, no innovation is free from peril. He fully rejects the concept that an artistic language is limited by the artistic medium, and applies European chiaroscuro in the depiction of people and objects even though this is extremely difficult in lacquer work.” Hung has met the challenge, fusing styles and content in his smooth-surfaced works, both on board and on canvas, He has brought lacquer art a new vision and new subject which is attracting a new audience with its potential. At the same time, however, he is paying homage to the artists and artistsans who have gone before him, who used lacquer to depict everything from village life to war.
There are two immediate impressions of Hung’s work. The first is that a certain menacing darkness is implicit, even when he uses bright color and subtle hues. His dominant color are reds, browns, black, yellows, and light blues, and a variety of hues. This gives his work a shadowy appearance, but it is not derived entirely from his use of color; it is hinted at in his portraits of the people. The darkness is both around and within the person, a representation of the inner person. The second is that feelings of sadness and loneliness dominate, as if his subjects are utterly oppressed either by their traditions, or personal situations, unable ever to escape. Yet, their stillness speaks of resilience, the silent stoicism of the oppressed. He projects this through the posture of the figures and his attention to the lighting of each piece. Yet, however tragic, each figure is a powerful protagonist, unfaillingly at the center of Hung’s dramatic narrative. Within his dark, somewhat pessimistic, vision is a subtle piece of theater in which the decorative surface conceals an intricate personal drama. Hung is clearly haunted by the past.
“When I paint, I am always thinking of the past. I am always thinking of well-known stories. But I always think of working behind the story, not just the surface,” says Hung. “For me, the mother of the hero, the boy in a traditional family, reflects the demands of the ancestors. She is the story behind the child. The influence of the past is strong for me because of my own childhood, from books that I read, and from my grandparents. I have heard many stories about my family and it is this past which is an obsession. I can say that the historical environment of Vietnam is very important as I m using the past to tell a story about today’s society. My painting are just a starting point as the past is a mirror of the present.
“I try to see what is behind the mirror, beyond the surface – the sadness, the tragedy. I try to understand it for what it is. All the people in my painting are oppressed by something. It could be ritual, position, poverty, religion, anything. But it is not be same for everyone. It is true that I am always thinking of the sadness of a story. But it is a part of my character to think of the worst in a situation and be prepared for it, but I am also preparing for it to be better. But I think this is also true of the character of lacquer work. You have to be patient.”
The bridging of tradition and modernity “does not exclusively depend on artistic media or motifs,” according to Le Thiet Cuong. “Hung’s solution and achievement is his novel view of ancient things.” This view, however, is not simply an intellectual understanding of these things: it is a feeling for them and knowing intuitively their value to one’s own emotions and one’s artistic vision. An element of these “ancient things” binds Hung’s stories that he has absorbed, through study and contact with artisans and from his family’s oral history of his country.
Transforming this into a visual narrative that evokes the general emotions attached to small towns and villages, festivals and the ritual of the pagodas, as in The Procession (1998), is not a simple task. Here the scent of incense, the murmur of priests, the silence of death, and the burden of ritual set the work alive in a deceptively meditative manner. Transforming, too, the anonymous individual into protagonist we share their anxiety and feelings of loss, love, or implied oppressive traditions. This is equally difficult and presents a more personal challenge to the artists, for he can not escape into the generalization of a crowded scene. In Family Tradition, Memory, Still life, and Burden of Traditions Hung’s close observation and placement of individual details of clothing and items such as coins, books, ingots, urns and so on, as well as careful attention to color, lends balance to his work, endowing it with the “presence” of hidden lives, as in his still life works where one expects a figure to appear at any moment to claim their place. In the lonely figurative works the placement of objects is deceptively casual and well juxtaposed with the posture of the figures.
The positioning of each figure and its form is important for it implies a variety of subtle traditions and attitudes of power. In Song of the King (1998), the child represents what his will inherit and the expectations of the father and the family. Even as he struggles with childhood and change he is oppressed by the past and the expectations of others. In Family Tradition (1997) the spirit of the ancestors beside the urn set behind the child in the foreground in prayer represents the pull of the past on the present. Individual figures as in Burden of Tradition, Weddings Anxieties, and Family Tradition project startling feelings of sadness and loneliness that are striking. Even Hung’s still life have an overwhelming feeling of sadness to them. His placement of objects such as urns, scrolls, books, bowls, jewelry, tablets, furniture, and incense burners is witness to the care which Hung takes to construct a scene. Each item is significant in itself, but brought together within the picture there is the collective power of ritual and tradition. To have excluded one item from any of his still lifes would have been to diminish the overall impact.
With each step of his process, Hung draws not only upon the physical realities of the techniques of lacquer painting, but also upon the mysteries of the traditions from which he has learned to make works that recreate the process of memory. It is rare that memory is absolutely clear, definite in itself, worthy entirely of being marked down as the “truth” Realizing this, Hung has made work which is strong and gentle at the same time, and is as revealing of himself as a man, as it is about his intuitive understanding of women. Through the application of layer upon layer of lacquer, the constant adjustment of color and polishing. Hung draws out his figures in a way that s very different from that of an oil painter. Through this long process he controls not only the surface images he seeks from his narrative, but also the mystery of the people he is creating. In this Hung is clearly like a photographer or a filmmaker who, by degrees of manipulation of light and shadow, is able to enhance or detract from the myths he is making.
This is most evident in his individual figures, of which many are women – standing, sitting, crouching, lying down, hunched over, and so on. It is in these women that one sees most clearly Hung’s personal statement of anguish and loss, of pain and loneliness and rejection. His interpretation of such experience has required that he place his figures at the center of his work, with an object or two, and with the suggestion of infinite space, an effect he achieves through misty, minimalist backgrounds. There is no clear line where the figures join the painting; they seem to float, the disembodied being drifting in space.
“In traditional society men were given more respect, their position was considered higher and women were considered lower, unequal. My women reflect the other side. I think more about women and their fate,” says Hung. “Even when I see a happy woman I see it as unreal in the sense that it won’t last long in their lives as they take care of everyone, I see it in my female friends from school, their position today, what they are like when looking at their grandmothers. The sadness on my women is not to suggest inferiority but to respect them. In The Poet (1998), for example, the woman sits reading, the urn behind her represents the pull of the ancestors. In ancient society women were not allowed to have an education, to read or write expect, perhaps, at home. They could not become a magistrate or a bureaucrat. They were trapped by their situation, like a bird in a birdcage.”
Not all of Hung’s female figures are of the past. He has made many who very much represent the modern woman he sees around him. The transition from traditional figure to a modern one imposes upon Hung the need to extend the myths with which he is working. Like his historical figures, these women are not definite individuals, but are composites of what Hung sees and wishes to project within his narrative. The myth is arrived at from observation and learning, but the layering and polishing are fertile actions for serendipitous experience, also part of myth making. In almost all his work one senses the unseen story behind the surface, the presence of past figures, the ancestors, seem to lurk just beyond the surface, haunting the present bearers of tradition. The cowering figure or the upright mandarin, the crowd or the pages of books with their calligraphy implying learning and secret power, all herald the unseen hand of tradition. And where there are strong traditions, there are equally powerful myths and legends, truths and lies, at work. Silently and unseen, the past keeps the present in line, tempering change, maintaining a role for the past well into the future, thus anchoring his character. Hung intuitively understands this and it is clear in his aesthetic sense and in the characters he makes, either brooding or reservedly sensual.
Moving between the formal decorative qualities of lacquer and the expressiveness of it as an experimental contemporary medium through which myriad emotions can be expressed as forcefully as in any other medium, is a challenge that Hung has met head on. Technically he is superb. Visually he has set himself apart from what has gone before to the point that he is truly an individual voice.
