20151011 khanh catalogue final

BUI CONG KHANH FORTRESSTEMPLE Curated by Iola Lenzi

FortressTemple history and power in recent art by Bui Cong Khanh Iola Lenzi

The writing and interpretation of history is intimately tied to the writer’s position vis-à-vis power and state. In Vietnam, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, a critical reading of narratives of history is intrinsic to the development of civil society. In colonial-era Vietnam foreigners commandeered the past, chronicling its history and constructing its interpretation from their own view-point rather than that of indigenous populations. In post-colonial Vietnam, in the wake of mid-twentieth century nation-building and war, history has been employed by the regime as a tool of ideological promotion. But as Vietnamese society has opened in the post-Doi Moi period, citizens, and more especially some visual artists, through their practice have sought empowerment, reclaiming history and its ramifications related to the current social context. (1) Saigon-based multi-media practitioner Bui Cong Khanh (b.1972), born at the end of the American war and witness to his country’s metamorphoses of recent decades, surveys Vietnamese life and culture with his eye trained on the nation’s social and political tensions.

He scrutinizes these alert to the impact of history and power in shaping Vietnamese contemporary existence. Images from street and traditional culture, emblems and texts of the state, and symbols of religion are among the building blocks of Khanh’s visual lexicon.

But if putting collective concerns at the heart of his art, Khanh’s approach is neither literal nor didactic. Reinforcing concept through a tactical use of a broad spectrum of media, including craft and others outside the ambit of art school orthodoxy, the artist adopts form, artistic process, and material for their ability to impart additional meaning via cultural connotation and the triggering of sensorial response: blue and white porcelain, textile, song and sound, food and agriculture, as well as more standard techniques and media are combined to articulate the artist’s ideas. In addition to deploying specific media and materials to enrich a work’s significance, Khanh frequently designs participative pieces to enroll audiences into exchange with his premises, his art actively provoking thought and reaction. (2) While past projects have explored consumer habits, communist propaganda, rural Vietnam’s transformations, social exclusion, abuse of power, and state surveillance, more recently Khanh has examined evolving nationalist sentiment as Vietnam rethinks its place in the world today.

For FortressTemple, a new exhibition commissioned by Hong Kong’s 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, four bodies of work by Bui Cong Khanh have been curatorially assembled for their thematic links, their sophisticated choice of material to amplify concept, and their furthering of a recognizably Southeast Asian expressive language. The four pieces dialogue effectively because even as each has been produced over a five-year span, in and about different environments –Europe, Vietnam, and Burma- all take on and mediate forces of authority and civil society that in their interaction speak of the precarious construction of nation, as relevant in contemporary China as in Southeast Asia. Several pieces take Vietnam’s ancient and modern colonial histories as starting points, while another, created for a Yangon initiative, is rooted in recent Burmese political history. All however, though local in inspiration, overstep parochial specifics of time and geography and if starting from the artist’s view on an event of history or a social situation, make place for audiences unfamiliar with that event. In their 2

Dinh Q. Le, The Quality of Mercy, room installation, photography, 1996, photo N. Kraevskaia

expressive construction and way of sharing physical and intellectual space collaboratively with the viewer, these works possess an inclusive, humanistic character that allows everyone in. More important still, they offer a subtle empowerment: experienced outside their original place of conceptualisation and fabrication, they disclose something intangible, an essence of history, of passing time, and the individual’s place in this story, his or her intercession shaping the now and the future beyond concerns of nation.

In the performative Hymne National (or ‘National Anthem’ ongoing from 2010), the installation Fortress Temple/The Story of Blue, White and Red (2013-2015), and Dinner Party, commissioned for this exhibition, Bui Cong Khanh unpicks Vietnam’s twentieth century historical narrative to focus on his country’s relationship with its French and Chinese colonial past. A room-scaled installation, Prayer on the Wind, for its part confronts opposing poles of power in Myanmar, distilled through the vision and senses of the single cocooned viewer.

Even as all these pieces’ media and formal construction differ, their respective expressive approach, essential subject matter, and artistic process fit a well-documented Southeast Asian methodology whereby incidents from history are communicated, sometimes indirectly, as a critical entry-point for scrutinising current realities. (3) Thus Khanh’s art not only counters

the selective amnesia that afflicts many willing to forget unsavory episodes of history, but also undermines officially-sanctioned versions of history –disseminated in Asia as elsewherethat are invented to hide ugly truths. These works may therefore obliquely challenge various types of authority, social exclusion, and established hierarchies. They also suggest history’s pernicious role in the creation and perpetuation of authoritarian power structures.

Hymne National, first developed by the artist in 2010 during a French residency, builds tension through its contrasting of compelling sensual and lyrical form, and the evocation of Vietnam’s still ambiguous relationship with its French colonial era sixty years after the country’s 1954 defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu that ended the First Indochina War and heralded Vietnam’s two-decade North-South partition. Bui Cong Khanh’s live two-man sound and writing performance superimposes the singing of French and Vietnamese national anthems as the French singer of La Marseillaise inscribes the revolutionary composition on Bui Cong Khanh’s naked back with brush and Chinese ink. In the meantime, as Bui Cong Khanh sings the Vietnamese anthem, he transcribes its lyrics in ink on a full-length mirror reflecting both him and his French counterpart. In its layering of expressive idioms – ink, brush, body, song, optics through mirror reflection - , and antagonistic conflation of the anthem’s patriotic ethos and the intimate, writing-tango of the French-Vietnamese duo, the piece visually and phonically encapsulates Vietnam’s and France’s love-hate bond. Hymne National, dissonant in the confrontation of the two anthems, yet poetic in its aesthetic, leaves viewers to untangle colonialism’s imperial oppression from its cultural borrowing and benefit. (4) Fortress Temple, initially conceptualised in 2013-2014, but developed and expanded with a video component in 2015 for this exhibition, is underpinned by the artist’s personal heritage as a mixed Chinese-Vietnamese, and current geo-political anxiety focused on China’s recent manifestation of military ambition in the South China Sea. (5) Adopting porcelain as medium

for its reference to China and Vietnam’s shared ceramic art that for both peoples represents (top to bottom)

high culture as well as trade commodity, Khanh introduces a multi-part installation where

Sutee Kunavichayanont, History Class Part 2, participative installation, 23 engraved used children’s desks, 2013, photo author.

conceptually to probe the complex and conflicted Sino-Vietnamese story spanning two

Roberto Feleo, Fictional Portrait of Esteban Villenueva, mixed media, 2009, photo Eva Morisot.

Bui Cong Khanh, Hymne National, sung performance duo, 2010, photo author.

the aesthetic and cultural significance of the quintessentially traditional porcelain is wielded millennia.

Fortress Temple evokes Vietnam’s millennial relationship with China and the two nations’ strained rapport through imagery finely painted on a sequence of vases named The Story of Blue, White and Red, but also through material, namely ceramics. The piece is therefore inscribed in a Southeast Asian genealogy whereby medium, form and iconography, handled tactically by the artist, operate in tandem to impart information impossible to convey through mere pictorial description or a single artistic language. In the case of this installation, Bui Cong Khanh’s choice of porcelain and the Chinese vase provide the viewer necessary clues for decoding ideas about the fractious China-Vietnam connection as well as the shifting nature of historical ‘truth’, the same past perceived and told differently on opposite sides of 3

the Vietnam-China border. This dual focus on friction and the haziness of history is all the more impactful for its materialisation as monumental but fragile vases in classic blue-andwhite style. Indeed, these embody paradox in their melding of an elegant aesthetic that denotes safe interiors, and belligerence as translated by the vases’ depictions of military helicopters and missiles emerging from tranquil pine forests, and artillery guns protruding from ancient temple walls.

This is not the artist’s first encounter with ceramics, Bui Cong Khanh’s contribution to GOMAAPT6 of 2009 comprising nine variously-sized blue and white porcelain vases painted with images of changing Vietnamese society in urban and rural settings. (6) Those pieces

from 2009, less conceptually resolved than Fortress Temple, were themselves inscribed in a continuum of Vietnamese contemporary art history written more than a decade before in Hanoi. In the late 1990s, Hanoi multi-media artist Nguyen Van Cuong (b. 1972) had pioneered the conceptual use of porcelain in Vietnamese contemporary art in his Porcelain Diary (1999-2001). (7) Via porcelain and the literary device of the diary, the artist produced

an 80-vase series that with densely painted tongue-in-cheek vignettes of burlesque erotica set in the urban landscape, imparts the Babelesque yet electrically exciting mood of transforming Hanoi post-Doi Moi. Executed like diary entries at regular intervals over three years, the cylindrical vessels are a pondered fusion of typologically-differing references: iconographic, via images of depravity contrasted with images of tradition and generic socialist propaganda; material, with polychrome porcelain; mode of production, the artist visiting the ancient imperial kiln village of Bat Tran in the countryside outside Hanoi on a systematic basis to immerse himself in its collectivist ethos (8); and the subversion of the vase’s standard sociological meaning, the flower vessel’s association with a genteel scholarofficials’ household (9) or religion, as part of traditional altar accouterments, ruptured by

Cuong to provide new significance and so discreetly challenge Vietnam’s status quo and power-holders. Porcelain Diary, artistically innovative, is emblematic of contemporary Southeast Asian art in its tightly-controlled balance of aesthetic virtuosity, tactile sensuality fueling viewers’ desire, and playfully altered codes of meaning that combined, propose incisive but slyly camouflaged social critique. (10) Though Nguyen Van Cuong’s earlier series and Bui Cong Khanh’s more recent work share medium and a distortion of codes to provide layered meaning, and if both rely on the power of aesthetics to entice audiences, Fortress Temple pushes the play with ceramics-as-medium further than Porcelain Diary, the manipulation geared to underlining the contradictions of history, its frequent departure from truth, and the fraught China-Vietnam connection. In addition to monumental blue-and-white vases, Fortress Temple includes mock archeological porcelain shards ‘aged’ under the sea and ‘patinated’ with crustaceans and algae as a means of recalling Chinese and Vietnamese cargo ship-wrecks and the two nations’ entangled liaison through trade. As well as revisiting Sino-Vietnamese maritime commercial history, the ocean-metamorphosed ceramics, in their manner of alteration, suggest the maneuverability of history and way in which distortions and falsehoods can be integrated into chronicles of the past, becoming ‘truth’. Outside China and Vietnam, the work reminds all publics of history’s vulnerability to revision.

A subset of the Fortress Temple installation are porcelain plates the artist calls Wartime Dinner. Presented as a duo, this installation within Fortress Temple comprises initially identical plates serving-up a miniature model of a tank. However while the first plate is standard, its twin is the underwater-patinated version, chalky from sea salt and encrusted with marine debris accumulated over its year on the ocean floor. This pair, like the vases from the same installation, use the juxtaposition of porcelain –emblem of civilization- and violence as signified by the tanks, to underline the un-naturalness and avoidability of force and war.

The artificial, man-made character of the sub-marine sediment on the dishes again alludes to the malleability of history and people’s ambition to twist it into desired shape, irrespective of truth and facts.

Enlarging this work is a short video showing Bui Cong Khanh recovering his ceramic shards in the ocean at the end of their ageing and patinating-stint. Documenting part of 4

Nguyen Van Cuong, Porcelain Diary, series of painted polychrome porcelain vases, 1999-2001, photo author.

the installation’s production process, the underwater film sequence’s slow, measured tempo, nearly dreamy, and muffled sound, are a foil to the tense imagery of the vases, so heightening the piece’s impact.

Thematically-related, the installation Dinner Party extends the conceptual reach of Fortress Temple. Performative in its call to ‘guests’, Dinner Party is an 8-place setting blue and white dinner service with gold trim. The china, hand-painted by Bui Cong Khanh, reprises the guns and military helicopters of the vistas depicted on Fortress Temple’s vases. Here however the arsenal is translated in Bui Cong Khanh’s own more graphic painterly style rather than one emulating classical Chinese brush painting such as seen on the vases. The artist also here dispenses with the landscape, picturing only details of war machines. This evolution within the exhibition corpus can be read as intimating a Vietnamese perspective rather than a Chinese one, signaling Vietnam’s increasing cultural and geo-political confidence as it assumes responsibilty for its position in the global power structure. It also argues for mobile Vasan Sitthiket, Awake and Move (Lost Info), participative statuette installation, cast fibreglass, 2011, photo author.

cultural history whereby aesthetic and other types of borrowings from outside sources are appropriated and transformed, becoming Vietnam-home-grown.

Once more in Dinner Party materials and techniques intimate meaning. Finely painted and enhanced with gold leaf, the service is best-quality porcelain, recalling high Chinese and Vietnamese culture, while its gold borders are in French taste. The gold is a reminder of Vietnam’s uninhibited but selective appropriation of European ideas which, once recontextualised and indigenised, changed meaning and character. Through this intimation of old artistic borrowing and back and forth cultural exchange, Bui Cong Khahn brings critical nuance to discourses of post-colonial rejection and shame attached to colonial-time cultural adoptions, and also highlights the transcontinental give and take that is a feature of culture everywhere. The plates’ gold trim, more directly, points to the new money and materialism that have so radically transformed Vietnamese society since Doi Moi, fundamentally challenging the nation’s communist ideology. (11) Yet Dinner Party, even as it acknowledges intersections of civilisations as the paternity of culture, asserts Vietnam’s ownership of its destiny.

Static as a set of plates may be, the piece, in its anticipation of a formal gathering around food, is dynamic. And deliberately open-ended, Dinner Party is as fluid in its physical setup as in its layering of ideas. The artist entertains flexibility in the plates’ arrangement –the service can be set-out formally on a table, awaiting guests; or stacked, discovered through handling; or displayed trophy-like on a wall- so allowing for the party’s changing nature and indicating its shifiting power balance over time and according to invitees’ national affiliations. Bui Cong Khanh’s ‘hosting’ of a banquet attended by Chinese, Vietnamese, and possibly European invitees unites at the same table those who share history, but do not necessarily agree about its content. Metaphorically together ‘eating’ the war machines on their plates, the imagined guests lend the work a performative feel that coupled with its freedom of display, reinforce the sense of the party’s unpredictable outcome. This unpredictability in turn conjurs the complexity of Vietnam and China’s thorny relationship, and the mutual fear one has for the other, especially since the Cold War when they were military foes. But full of humanity too, with pathos Dinner Party speaks of individuals fraying their way among ancient belligerences and current geopolitics and through meeting over dinner, transcending them. The piece therefore functions both as commentary on the tense and seemingly unsurmountable legacy of history; and a dose of optimism on the individual’s capacity to abandon old patterns to take alternative paths. With the universally familiar and commonplace dinner set, Bui Cong Khanh creates a space for questioning entrenched attitudes and the possibiility of individual empowerment.

Through their subversion of China and Vietnam’s common artistic language ceramics, via their imagery of temples and landscapes that are the spiritual and visual heritage of both nations, and via depictions of war machinery perturbing idyllic vistas that remind us of recent decades’ hostilities between these countries, Fortress Temple and Dinner Party show the unresolved, fast-evolving linkage that China and Vietnam share, China’s geo-political might not preventing Vietnam’s joining the fray. These works eschew the taking of sides however 5

and instead operate, among other things, as a critique of nationalist saber-rattling North and South of the China-Vietnam border, as well as asserting the mutable reading of history.

Formally distinct to the previously discussed works and this time calling actively for audience participation is Prayer on the Wind. A cloth temple-like structure made from cut-out and sewn patchwork squares of Burmese monks’ saffron robes, interdispersed with military camouflage, the piece boasts a number of pockets on its outer walls into which members of the public insert notes inscribed with their ideas and wishes, sacred or secular. Once these scraps of paper materializing prayers have been stuffed into the piece’s stitched pockets, viewers lie on a mat under the cloth temple to rest and meditate. As they do so, they bathe in radiant shafts of colour produced as light filters through the installation’s textile ramparts.

Co-opting the public sensorially through experiential play, and prompting small gestures of civic empowerment exercised as text-based interaction, Prayer on the Wind triggers thought about the supposed protecting-nurturing role of state institutions such as government, the military and religion, as well as the rivalry between them. Originally conceptualised in Myanmar and referencing recent altercations between the Burmese Sangha and the army, Prayer on the Wind translates meaningfully to contexts where citizens question authority’s modes of operation and legitimacy. (12) Like Fortress Temple this installation fits into a lineage of Southeast Asian contemporary art, in this case participative and text-based work that can be traced back several decades. As early as 1977 Indonesia’s FX Harsono produced his What would you do if these crackers were real pistols? (13). Harsono’s installation, a floor-displayed mound of edible, life-size pistol-shaped rice crackers, and the note-book the artist provides viewers to write their response to the work

as posed by its title, is a precocious example of regional contemporary art bearing canondefining traits including public participation through message-making. Displaying hallmarks that continue, over decades, to singularise Southeast Asian contemporary practice, Pistols is a precursor of later pieces that marry everyday-familiar imagery, pedestrian materials, and audience involvement through written-response to achieve a questioning of social and political status quo, state violence, and instrumentalisations of power. Oeuvres such as Vasan Sitthiket’s 1994 108 Questionaires for Thai People and the 2011 Awake and Move (Lost Info), Sutee Kunavichayanont’s 2008 Selective History/Memory, Michael Shaowanasai’s 2007 Buddha Sangha Dharma, Lee Wen’s World Class Society (1999-2000), or Bui Cong Khanh’s 2012 Commitment Culture, all, like Prayer on the Wind, ellicit engagement through the viewer or artist’s textual contribution. (14) Among traits shared by Harsono and Khanh’s pieces is their ability to step beyond the local circumstances that spawned them, calling to audiences beyond time and place. Just as Harsono produced What would you do if these crackers were real pistols to address the repression and violence of Indonesia’s Suharto dictatorship in the 1970s, Bui Cong Khanh, with Prayer on the Wind, is responding to conflicts between the Burmese Sangha and the military government in 2007 and the years that followed until Burma’s transition to civilian rule in 2011. Yet if both Harsono in 1977, and Bui Cong Khanh in 2015, are making art that is their answer to site-and-time-punctual events, their materials, approachable imagery, and mode of audience-enlisting through written reply, enrols broad publics, irrespective of the event’s age, in a mobile exchange about power and its use by authority. These pieces, not pedagogical in tone, but using conceptual strategies well-known in Southeast Asian sociallyinflected art (15), inspire viewers to draw their own conclusions. Their dynamic conversation with the public about violence, control, and choice provide them a wide reach. Harsono’s

installation, with its easily legible concept of piled-guns-as-innocuous-food --girlish pink no less-- is today as sharply probing of abuses of power as it was four decades ago. The strength of this piece, and the continuing state-institutional discomfort it provokes, were confirmed recently when the Vietnamese authorities refused to allow its display in a June 2015 Hanoi exhibition. (16) The work, and others like it that form the Southeast Asian canon, confront power indirectly but effectively by prompting the viewer to occupy the centre of an issue rather than its periphery.

Formal charisma, seduction of the senses, sharply-honed cultural cues, and a call to 6

(top to bottom) Bui Cong Khanh, Commitment Culture, carved wooden doors, participative text installation, 2012, photo artist.

FX Harsono, What would you do if these crackers were real pistols?, participative text installation, rice-cracker-shaped pistols, originally produced 1977, this version 2013, photo author.

audience experience come together in the four works of FortressTemple. Though produced in different places, responding to different concerns, and articulated with different media and materials, all stimulate viewers to join the artist in a critical reading of history as a means of deciphering contemporary life and its tensions. Inviting physical and metaphysical involvement, Hymne National, Fortress Temple, Prayer on the Wind, and Dinner Party ask but do not answer queries about truth, power, and personal responsibility as these are negotiated by us all, inside or outside Asia. Bui Cong Khanh, socially cogent in Vietnam, with his well-travelled eye, connects situations in Vietnam and the wider world. FortressTemple demonstrates how art nurtured in one locale and context can translate to other places and time-frames. The ambiguity of history and its lies, the repackaging of history into nostalgia, and the way in which violence and ugliness can seem metamorphosed and even erased with time, are uncomfortable phenomena known to us all.

August 2015 NOTES 1) Southeast Asian artists whose works often revolve around critical readings of history include from Vietnam Dinh Q. Le; Thailand: Sutee Kunavichayanont, Vasan Sitthiket, Manit Sriwanichpoom; Indonesia: FX Harsono, Arahmaiani, Dadang Christanto; Singapore: Lee Wen, Amanda Heng, Zai Kuning, Tang Da Wu; Malaysia: Yee I-Lann, Wong Hoy Cheong; Philippines: Brenda Fajardo, the Aquilizan duo, Roberto Feleo, Josephine Turalba, among many more.

2) Recent participative pieces are Saigon Slum and Commitment Culture, both 2012.

3) Exhibitions that explicitly develop these ideas are Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011 at Singapore Art Museum, 2011; and Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2013. Both exhibitions argue social concern, non-literal or conceptual approaches, media borrowing from vernacular, audience involvement, and history as critical mode of entry, among other thematic or processual markers stamping Southeast Asian contemporary art.

4) Hymne National was first conceptualised and performed in France, August 2010. It was performed and filmed in 2012, in Singapore and performed and filmed in Istanbul, September 2014, documented in the catalogue of the exhibition The Roving Eye: contemporary art from Southeast Asia, ARTER/Koc Foundation. On issues of positive-negative influences of colonialism on Vietnamese art see Nora A. Taylor, Painters in Hanoi An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art, Singapore: NUS Press, 2009, p. 38.

5) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/08/china-land-reclamation-south-china-sea-stokesfears-military-ambitions last accessed 2 August 2015 on China-Vietnam tensions.

6) APT6, the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, was held in Brisbane at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art from 5 December 2009 to 10 April 2010. Bui Cong Khanh’s ceramics are discussed and the conceptual nature of ceramic-as-medium argued in Iola Lenzi, “Lost and Found: tracing premodern cultural heritages in Southeast Asian contemporary art”, in Connecting Art and Heritage, ed. Bui Thi Thanh Mai, Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2014, pp. 132-133.

7) The author has discussed this series in “Negotiating Home, History and Nation”, in Negotiating Home, History and Nation: two decades of contemporary art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011, ed. Iola Lenzi, Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011, p. 19; and “Conceptual Strategies in Southeast Asian Art: a local narrative”, in Concept Context Contestation- art and the collective in Southeast Asia, ed. Iola Lenzi, Bangkok: Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2014, p. 18. ; and “The Roving Eye: Southeast Asian Art’s Plural views on self, culture, and Nation”, in The Roving Eye-Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, eds. Iola Lenzi and Ilkay Balic, Istanbul: ARTER/Koc Foundation, 2014, p. 40.

8) Author’s interview with Nguyen Van Cuong, December 2010, Hanoi.

9) Vietnam’s rigid social hierarchy follows the Confucian order that puts officials/scholars first; farmer second; craftsman third; tradesman-business man last.

10) Small inks on do paper from the 1990s by Nguyen Van Cuong, included in Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia, 2013 and travelled to Hanoi by BACC Bangkok as part of Travelling CCC Hanoi in June 2015, were not authorized for exhibition by the Vietnamese Cultural Department, confirming that works by this artist continue to disturb Vietnam’s authorities.

11) On problems relating to the importation of French aesthetics to Vietnamese art in the 20th century Nora Taylor, Painters in Hanoi, 2009, pp. 23-34. On Doi Moi see Melanie Beresford, “Vietnam: the Transition for Central Planning”, in Garry Rodan et al eds., The Political Economy of South-East Asia: conflict, crises, change, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001.

12) On the Saffron Revolution, see http://www.economist.com/node/9867036 last accessed 12 August 2015.

13) This piece, first shown in Jakarta in 1977, was remade in 2013 for the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre exhibition Concept Context Contestation- art and the collective in Southeast Asia (December 2013-March 2014).

14) On the place of language of the state in Southeast Asian contestative art Lenzi, “Conceptual Strategies”, Concept Context Contestation, BACC, 2014, pp. 21-22.

15) For a developed defense of this idea Lenzi, “Conceptual Strategies”, Concept Context Contestation, 2014.

16) Above-mentioned Concept Context Contestation- art and the collective in Southeast Asia, a survey of Southeast Asian art including FX Harsono’s Pistols, was travelled to Goethe Insititut, Hanoi in June 2015 for Travelling CCC Hanoi organized by Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Pistols was among seven CCC works that were not permitted for public display by the Vietnamese authorities (see note 10).

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PRAYER ON THE WIND

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Prayer on the Wind Participative installation monk’s robes, camouflage textile, handwritten notes, mat and pillow Installation shot Goethe Institut, Yangon 260 x 218 x 223 cm 2015

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HYMNE NATIONAL

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Hymne National Singing and writing performance duo, 2010 Singapore version, 2012 Videography by Valentin Milou

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FORTRESS TEMPLE

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Fortress Temple The Story of Blue, White and Red 1 Porcelain, hand-painted underglaze blue and red 158 x 47cm 2013

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Fortress Temple The Story of Blue, White and Red 3 Porcelain, hand-painted underglaze blue and red 158 x 47cm 2013

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Fortress Temple The Story of Blue, White and Red 4 Porcelain, hand-painted underglaze blue and red 158 x 47cm 2013

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Fortress Temple The Story of Blue, White and Red 5 Porcelain, hand-painted underglaze blue and red 125 x 45cm 2013

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Fortress Temple The Story of Blue, White and Red 6 Porcelain, hand-painted underglaze blue and red 125 x 45cm 2013

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Find-found-found Video 4:42 2015

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Fortress Temple Pair of hand-painted archaeological shards, before and after ocean-submersion (1) Porcelain, encrusted porcelain 57 x 47cm 2013 - 2014

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Fortress Temple Pair of hand-painted archaeological shards, before and after ocean-submersion (2) Porcelain, encrusted porcelain 17 x 50cm 2013 - 2014

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Wartime Dinner Pair of hand-painted porcelain plates, before and after ocean-submersion Porcelain, encrusted porcelain D 35cm 2013 - 2014

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DINNER PARTY DOWRY - MONKEY BRAIN

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Dinner Party Set of 16 porcelain dinner plates, hand-painted underglaze blue with gold preparatory sketches, work in production 2015

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Dowry - Monkey Brain (version 2) Porcelain, hand-painted D 35 cm 2013

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About the curator

Iola Lenzi is a Singapore researcher, curator and critic of Southeast Asian contemporary art. She has conceptualised and curated numerous institutional exhibitions (Singapore Art Museum; Bangkok Art and Culture Centre; ARTER/ Koc Foundation, Istanbul; The James H.W. Thompson Foundation, Bangkok; Esplanade, Singapore; Goethe Institut Hanoi and Yangon) as a means of charting art-historical themes predicated on Southeast Asia’s cultural, social and political landscape. She is also the curator of Masterpieces- digital art in Southeast Asia, Samsung Art Projects (ongoing).

Lenzi is a lecturer in the Asian Art Histories MA programme of Singapore’s Lasalle-Goldsmiths College of Art (University of London). She has commissioned, edited and contributed to multi-author research catalogues and is the author of Museums of Southeast Asia (Thames and Hudson 2005).

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About the artist

Born in 1972 in Danang, Vietnam, Bui Cong Khanh lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Bui Cong Khanh’s art explores historical and contemporary issues in Vietnam.

Gaining international recognition for his performances from the late 1990s, in addition to using his body Khanh deploys painting, video, photography, and multi-media installation to question power and restrictions of individual expression in communist Vietnam. Exploring the impact of Vietnam’s complex history and social contradictions on Vietnamese life today, Bui Cong Khanh’s practice, conceptual as well as aesthetically accomplished, is deeply philosophical and reactive to the world around him.

Bui Cong Khanh’s work is in institutional collections including the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and the Koc Foundation, Istanbul.

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CURRICULUM VITAE

BUI CONG KHANH

Born in 1972, Da Nang City, Vietnam EDUCATION BFA, Oil Painting Department, University of Fine Arts, Ho Chi Minh City SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2013 For Home and Country, Yavuz Fine Art, Singapore 2010 JUICE, Java Café, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

SAFE, L’USINE, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

LIFE IS CONSUMPTION, SanArt, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 2005 The Souvenir, Mai’s Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 2004 I AND THE WHAT, Mai’s Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2015 Reshaping Tradition: Contemporary Ceramics from East Asia, Pacific

Asia Museum, LA, USA

Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia,

Travelling CCC Hanoi, Goethe Institut, Hanoi, Vietnam

Building Histories, Goethe Institut, Yangon, Myanmar 2014 THE ROVING EYE: contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, ARTER/Koc

Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey

Sensorium 360°: contemporary Art and the Sensed World, Singapore

Art Museum, Singapore 2013 Concept Context Contestation: art and the Collective in Southeast Asia, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), Bangkok, Thailand 2013 Art Basel13, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong 2012 Four Rising Talents from South East Asia, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery,

Hong Kong

Stamp Art, performance, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery,

Chicago, IL, USA 2011 “The Past Moved” Asia-Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art

Prize, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore 2010 Making History, Esplanade, Singapore 2009 The Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT)-Queensland’s Art

Gallery, QLD, Australia

INTERSECTION Vietnam: New Works from North & South, Valentine

Willie Fine Art, Singapore

INTERSECTION Vietnam: New Works from North & South, Valentine

Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

TIME LIGAMENTS contemporary Vietnamese artists,10 Chancery Lane

Gallery, Hong Kong

Who do you think we are…?, Bui Gallery, Hanoi, Vietnam 2007 Future, SanArt, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Young Artists Exhibition, Hanoi Fine Arts University, Hanoi, Vietnam 2006 Exhibition and Performance, Java Café, Phnom Penh, Cambodia 2005 International Performance Art Festival Asiatopia 2005, Bangkok, Thailand

The Man Makes Rain, Video art at House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany

Taiwan International Performance Art Festival (Reaching Outlying-

2005TIPALive), Taipei, Taiwan

Young Artists Exhibition, Saigon South Arts Center, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 50

2004 Sea Arts Festival, Busan Biennale, Busan, Korea

International Art Performance, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea

International Art Performance Congress, Welcome Gold, Seoul, Korea

NIPAF Asian Performance Art Series, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagano, Nagoya, Japan

Young View Competition, Centre Culturel Francais de Hanoi, 2nd Prize 2003 Performance, Blue Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Installation and Performance at Binh Quoi village, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The Color, Hoi An artist Club Exhibition, Hoi An, Vietnam

Seoul-Asia Art Now, Seoul, South Korea 2002 Hoi An’s People, La Gai Arts Space, Vietnam

Windows to Asia arts network, (ANA) Vietnam Workshop,

Contemporary Art Centre, Hanoi, Vietnam

Asiatopia 2002, International Performance Art Festival, Bangkok, Thailand

Melting Pot, International workshop, Toulouse, France

Vietnam Multifaceted, Toulouse, France

Tiedeux du Sud, Impressions Gallery, Paris, France 2000 Arts Exhibition for World Peace, GANA gallery Seoul, Korea 1999 Young Artists Show, Blue Gallery, Da Nang City, Vietnam 1998 Young Artists Show, Viet Nam Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 1997 Who Am I? French and Vietnamese students, Fine Art University, Ho

Chi Minh City, Vietnam 1996 Youth Club Annual Exhibition, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam AWARDS 2011 One of 15 finalists at the Asia-Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature

Art Prize 2011, The Past Moved exhibited at Singapore Art Museum, Singapore 2005 Winner of Fullbright Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, VT, USA 2004 Young View Competition, Centre Culturel Francais de Hanoi, 2nd Prize RESIDENCIES 2013 Creative Fusion, International Artist Residency Program, Cleveland,

OH, USA 2010 Southeast Asian Visual Art Residence 2010, Fondation de la Roche

Jacquelin, Maine-et-Loire, France 2005 Vermont Studio Center, VT, USA

51

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The curator, artist, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery thank: ARTER/Koc Foundation, Istanbul Franz Xaver Augustin, Yangon Goethe Institut, Yangon Nelson Lam, Hong Kong Valentin Milou, London Vasan Sitthiket, Bangkok

ALL WORKS OF ART COPYRIGHT © BUI CONG KHANH ESSAY COPYRIGHT © IOLA LENZI A VIBRANT LIFE PUBLICATION / 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Designed by Prima Yu Photo credits: Photographs by Bui Cong Khanh and Ly Hoang Ly - P.15 Photographs by Bui The Trung Nam - P.23-31, P.34-39, P.45 This catalogue is published on the occasion of Bui Cong Khanh’s solo exhibition FortressTemple at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong from September 17 October 10, 2015.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-988-16892-0-7 Printed in Hong Kong, 2015

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