Living, today for tomorrow presents the latest works by Nguyen Hoa (Hue), Vicente Arresse (Leipzig) and Quế (Danang-Saigon), which were created during their time staying and working at A. Farm from September to November 2024. The exhibition title, rather than an attempt to impose a framework that binds together the thoughts and experiments of all three artists, suggests how each artist uses their creativity to engage and reflect on contemporary life — one that is inextricably bound by historical legacies and heritage, by the complexity of familial relationships, and by never-subsiding demand for innovation and convenience.
Que rents a room in a house near the Nhieu Loc – Thi Nghe canal in the part where water seems to stop flowing, arresting its inhabitants in a cacophony of smells. Days and months pass, it is hard to tell what is reality and what is dream. In unison, the children recite this folk poem in their singing voice:
“In the pond nothing is more beautiful than a lotus
Green leaf, white petal, and a yellow pistil
Yellow pistil, white petal, green leaf
Grow in mud but never smell like so.”
Is it really so? Can we, like the said lotus, outgrow our environment no matter how polluted it is? Sleepwalking between minutes and hours of his childhood memory and current mental state, Quế found himself stranded in a looped siesta. Water, the source of life that is often praised for its fluidity, here appears as an insidious, malicious force. Drops of water seeped into the ground, then gathered themselves in a haunting stagnant pond, or the breeding ground for a plethora of creatures that thrive in darkness.
In this part of the world, it is sunny, bright, and crisp. Streams of people and their things move seamlessly through the meandering streets. Without skipping a beat. Situating his unwavering fascination with ordinary, daily life objects in a new environment that is the bustling city of Saigon, Vicente Arresse reenacted and reconstructed a highly stimulated life where the natural and the artificial coexist efficiently. Extended modernity in a subdued slapstick comedy skit. Like the river that courses through the city, branching into a plexus of seemingly never-ending waterways, the city and its inhabitants are connected, life here held together by a system of poly-prefixed-repeated-strings-of-many-bonded-small-molecules industrial materials such as styrofoam, plastic and nylon that are loved for their natural shapeshifting abilities.
A citizen of Hue — a city in central Vietnam that served as the nation’s capital during the Nguyen dynasty that reigned from 1802 to 1945, Nguyen Hoa has always been captivated by the intricate wood-carving decorative patterns on furniture of this era. The admiration was so great that it prompted the artist to learn how to work with wood in his teenage years, and continue to master this craft until today. Recently, he started incorporating these patterns especially the apricot blossoms onto mundane household objects that are either discarded, broken or of no significant aesthetic value. Such a gesture without any particular expectation of altering the meaning of the objects, invites the viewer to focus on the relationship between the artist and his work, a time-honoured, caring and reciprocal relationship.