Undone – a solo exhibition by Hà Nội-based visual artist Nguyễn Trần Nam will open at 6pm tomorrow at Manzi Art Space.

The adjective ‘undone’ contains a host of possible meanings – distraught, fallen apart, unfinished, unaccomplished, ruined, destroyed – encompassing the uncanny nature of Nam’s most recent series of work.

The lacquer paintings mark a return to a medium from Nam’s formal training at the Việt Nam University of Fine Arts (graduated 2003) after a lengthy stint producing a diverse body of multimedia work as one of Hà Nội’s second-wave of contemporary artists.

Dark and heavy, the series’ brutal beauty reveals the artist’s concern with both the dead and the living and portrays his obsession with the ruins of landscapes and life. Forming an imaginary realm unbound by truth, time or place, these are images of chases, riots, crushed faces prostrating on the streets, someone’s shadow just gliding through the darkness on the other side of a door. The depictions seem to pass by without reason, no beginning or ending, no explanation.

For Nam, drawing is a kind of journaling process, during which he unconsciously chronicles the ambiguity drifting in his mind as a result of stories he has heard, experiences he has been through and the character of life as well as philosophical metaphors, a general state of absurdity and obsessions with literature and poetry or myths.

The free show is open until October 31. Manzi Art Space is at 14 Phan Huy Ích Street. — VNS