When we paint a picture, we wish to share exprimable and unexprimable hidden feelings with ourselves and at the same time we hope that everybody will know this from our paintings. The stroke, the harmony of colours, the drawing skills in the course of artistic creation are themselves connected to our sentimental life and they themselves become the message of our own feelings. It is very likely that what the author is aiming at agrees with his style but possibly it may be totally counter to it: the idea to convey is one thing and the meaning derived from the picture is another thing. For that reason, art is the crowning-piece of a series of endless creations that never coincide with our aspirations since this open-ended process requires our constant self-development with subsequent paintings.
I am here with the past behind me and the future lying ahead. Sometimes both the past and the future are visible but sometimes they get blurred, as remarked a poet of the T’ang dynasty: “Quan bu jian guren, Hou bu jian lai zhe” which means: “No ancient people are seen in front of me, And nobody too do I see in the rear”. This is to portray the loneliness of someone who devotes himself to artistic creativity.
Memories belong to the past but the latter is inside the present. We think of our deceased forefathers but our thought takes on a contemporary character. To paint something about our memories is reviewing, representing the past or turning to it with some events we want to forget and others we like to touch up. This is what Vu Hong Nguyen has done in his work: he wants to find his real self in memories. Sometimes they appear as unreal floating clouds, on other occasions they are portrayed like a flat expanse half covered with a few antiquities or a mossy wall of his infancy’s abode. We do not say decisively how great is the artist’s success but one thing we must recognize at first is his sophisticated, serious work and even his toilsomeness while labouring on his unexplored field. The main obstacle that hinders him is precisely his overemphasis on the beauty of each painting while in reality the process of digging out in artistic creativity itself requires the admission of disorder, and to some extent even unaestheticness or untidiness. This aestheticist tendency is common among several artists in our country at present and this prevents their art from having contact with society and their pictures from going father than the painter’s initial object, be it good and sound.
Although Vu Hong Nguyen paints in oils and in lacquer, he is fond of the spilling and smudging sensation in Chinese ink painting, and the mildness within antagonisms and conflicts. This is the expresstion of a rather peaceful childhood, but then suddenly tragedies and accidents occur, pushing him into a dark corner to view what is happening outside: the sun is then dazzling and makes things now visible, now smudged, blurred and shapeless. This is exactly the most poetic impression that needs to be recorded and instantly depicted in the picture with as many states of mind as possible to interestingly create series of artworks quite never-ending, having no stop.
To sum up all, what Vu Hong Nguyen has done is already good but I still hope the artist would ceaselessly enrich his cultural background and widen his outlook so that one can sit in one place and have the impression of being everywhere: likewise the paintings will become freer, with more openness and an easy access to many people with their common feelings instead of solely with beautiful colours. To paint for the sake of people is momentous, much more important than shaping up a style and establish a social position.
Hanoi, November, 20, 2005
Critic Phan Cam Thuong