Southeast Asia Globe
Vietnamese art curator Đỗ Tường Linh has practiced her craft from London to Cuba, the Middle East and back home to Vietnam again. She spoke to Southeast Asia Globe about her latest exhibition, her forays into expanding peoples’ understanding of politics through art, and creating a Global South-led art scene.
Walking into the Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA) in Hanoi, visitors almost immediately encounter a fifty-foot line of dirt and small rocks. The pathway of sorts – which some visitors step over more gingerly than others – leads to a large sculpture of a man standing in the centre of the gallery space, his faithful dog sitting at his feet.
Heading further into the vast, airy space, visitors are confronted with a long line of paintings across the left wall of the gallery depicting the inside of a slaughterhouse through a series of images. The medium for these images is dubbed “mixed media” on the gallery programme, as they were drawn partially using animal blood – a statement by the artist on the violent persistence of animal consumption.
The exhibition was co-curated by Đỗ Tường Linh, a 33-year-old Vietnamese researcher and art curator with a track record for unique and subversive artistic exploration. The sculpture work – created by Nguyen Dinh Phuong – and the slaughterhouse paintings – created by Nguyen Van Du – are two of eight works from nine emerging artists making up The Foliage III, the third iteration of the VCCA’s annual collection.
The exhibition, which debuted in the Vietnamese capital on 20 December, was carefully assembled to question assumptions and explore new ideas and frameworks for creating art that its audience may not have been previously exposed to.
Central to an alternative art movement of Vietnam and beyond, Đỗ’s curation revolves around a reflexive counterculture to the hegemonic variations of Western art seen all too often in the Global South, blurring the lines between what “should” and “can” be counted as art… Continue reading Southeast Asia Globe’s article HERE
