Exhibition honours VN pioneer artist

October 06, 2016 - 09:00

The exhibition Vũ Dân Tân and The Music will open on Friday at the Goethe Institute to mark the late artist’s 70 birth anniversary.

Music and colour: Artworks by Vũ Dân Tân at the upcoming exhibition held at Goethe Institute in Hà Nội. VNS Photo Đoàn Tùng
Viet Nam News

HÀ NỘI — The Goethe Institute will unveil Vũ Dân Tân and The Music, a multi-media exhibition, starting Friday to mark the late artist’s 70 birth anniversary.

Vũ Dân Tân and The Music celebrates the artist’s multi-facetted paintings, transformed objects, musical performance videos and sound installations.

Tân (1946-2009) was a pioneer of contemporary Vietnamese art. He was born in Hà Nội and began painting while travelling through Russia and Cuba.

He opened the Natasha Salon in Hà Nội in 1990, which was the first private gallery in Hà Nội at that time. Tân worked in very small and very large dimensions, making use of an enormous variety of materials.

The exhibition is being co-hosted by the Goethe-Institute and the Vũ Dân Tân Foundation, and it will be accompanied by an illustrated research catalogue. It is a rare chance to explore Tân’s love for music and how he connected music with his avant-garde visual art.

The exhibition presents artworks which refer to music and some that use musical elements. Most of these pieces have never been exhibited in Việt Nam or any other country. Tân’s works are on one hand closely related to traditional Vietnamese culture, while on the other hand they also are informed by a significant part of contemporary Asian art which emerged in the 1970s.

The exhibition is curated by Lola Lenzi, an art historian and curator with a focus on South East Asian art. She is also a Vũ Dân Tân expert. Lenzi has already curated a large number of institutional exhibitions in Europe and Asia engaging with regional, social, cultural and political systems. 

As part of the exhibition, a 10-people ensemble, Hanoi°Berlin, will perform a concert on October 22 at 8pm. Among other songs, the musicians will play pieces developed specifically for this show, based on Tân’s compositional drafts. Admission to the concert is free.

The exhibition is on from October 7 to 28 at 56-58 Nguyễn Thái Học Street. — VNS

 

 

 

 

E-paper