Visiting artist Nguyen Gia Trong’s most recent work explores the ghosts of family history
Trong Gia Nguyen Family, circa 1982 – Oil Pastel on Canvas – 57 x 82 inches – 2014
Portable Confessionals – Handcut Paper Grocery Bags – 17 x 12 x 7 inches – 2012
St. Sebastian (after Botticelli) – Cork, Wood, Aluminum Wire, Acrylic Paint – 72 x 22-3/4 x 1-5/8 inches – 2012
Words by Sadie Christie
Nguyen Gia Trong has become internationally recognised for the way his work pokes you in the ribs. Religion, capitalism, pop culture – nothing and no one is safe, especially not the art viewer, who looks at the seemingly simple gestures and finds herself wondering just what else he’s trying to say. Although born in Ho Chi Minh City, the artist has lived almost all of his life in America. It’s pretty clear that most of Trong’s work – expanding across mediums of sculpture, painting, installation, video, and performance art – speaks to and is about life framed within western culture.
It’s accessible and playful – a video series of artist commercials, a paper bag confessional, dart boards shaped in the likeness of Giovanni Bellini’s St. Sebastian – poking fun in order to raise questions about power dynamics within relationships, starting with art/viewer, and branching out over culture, politics and economy in the west. His work teases us as viewers, and often satirizes ways in which we all take part in and reinforce power structures.
Nguyen Gia Trong’s most recent exhibition however takes things in a different direction.This time Trong focuses on his own blurred history, one which began before his family emigrated to America; the end of the American War and his family’s subsequent escape from Saigon by boat in 1975. He was four when they fled Vietnam, and no one in his family has talked about this past since. The pieces in his exhibit ‘The Leavers’, uses colours and shadings you might find in a child’s colouring book, and are distinctly missing any outlines that would lend detail to the image. These are the unfocused and fragmented moments of that past, ‘coloured in’ through Trong’s memory, and old faded photographs. The work, showing at Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City, is the beginning of a larger documentary film project, DONG, in collaboration with artist David Raymond, which explores family history through the skewed nature of memories. Despite the pain of circumstance and the imperfections of the memories themselves, Trong, as in all his work, maintains a lightness and joy in exploring and reflecting on where he comes from.
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Trong Gia Nguyen exhibition is showing at Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City From 5 February to 28 March. He will give a talk at the Goethe Institut in Hanoi on February 9.
