Le Thiet Cuong through European eyes
by Max Johns
My first encounter with Cuong was difficult, to say the least. It was a dreadfully hot summer in Hanoi and I strolled the galleries and studios of the city. Among the bunch of funny, accommodating, group-oriented young and old painters and gallerists that I had met so far in the country, one was different. His name was Le Thiet Cuong. He was well-known and admired. But he stood apart.
We sat on the floor in Cuong's apartment, a translator beside. More than one phrase came seldomly from the painter, a deeply suspicious and introvert man, who didn't seem to mind, that I was from Europe and was interested in his work. "So what", was his bottom line.
However,
catching my attention were the superb works on his walls. A few of the rather minor works
were spread over several galleries of the city. He had obviously reserved the best of his
work for his own home.
The long line of philosophical books proved a profound education and above all: We
listened to music from Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach, the German composer of the 18th
century, who had lived and worked in times and in the spirit of enlightenment. His music
is certainly one of the most mathematically and intellectually structured works that has
ever been created. Bach's music is strikingly deep in its straightforward simplicity.
While sipping the green tea, I was surprised and felt strangely familiar.
The artist doesn't talk
The
only thing that came across that day: Cuong wasn't interested to give any of his paintings
away. The price didn't matter - he just wanted to keep them. And he wasn't much interested
to talk about his paintings or himself either. The lightness and friendly spirit of his
works contrasted disturbingly with the person I was meeting here. It didn't seem logic.
The paintings of Cuong give an easy access, they seem lighthearted and the stories often
tell of happy people and a seemingly ironic but loving observer. The person himself was
rather introvert and inaccessible. When walking out, I remembered the story of a clown,
who made other people laugh every day, but was sad himself.
Many people believe, Cuong's paintings could hang as well in museums as in children's
rooms. Is Cuong the clown, who makes children laugh but is deeper if you look a little
closer?
Several months later, we sat again in the same place. Miraculously, no translator was needed. Several years of work lay on the floor and we were chatting about his upcoming exhibition in Hongkong, at the time still the best kept secret in the Hanoi art-scene. Due to a power cut, no Bach was in the air. Cuong seemed a different man, as open as his paintings seem in the first place. And this time I had the chance to look a little closer. We had just shown his first dozen or so paintings to an European audience. People were excited, Cuong received rave reviews.
And then Coung invited me to what has been the most exciting event in my experience with Vietnamese art over the last years: we drove to his studio and I had a first glimpse on the most extraordinary thing Cuong has produced yet: the large format oil paintings, prepared for the exhibition in Hongkong.
Sitting in front of the Zen-Garden
Those
large formats gave me a distinct feeling, that had overcome me already when I had looked
at his works in Europe. We were not sitting in the dimly lit studio at the outskirts of
Hanoi, a huge light bulb swinging from the roof. We were sitting in front of a Zen-garden.
Those carefully styled gardens with gravel and stones. Most simplistic arrangements, that
invite for meditation, for intellectual rest in landscaped nature. It is a tamed nature,
structured simplicity that invites the visitor to meditation.
This is what comes to mind, when one has a close look at Coung's works: Careful, if not
minimalistic touches have shaped an art-scape, a space that invites to meditate over
reduced colors and a single, seemingly un-important event that is told. Like a single rock
raises amidst the carefully lined gravel in the Zen-garden, one little event stands out
from the uniform background of everyday life. The sensible observer Cuong picks just one
scene that is easily recognizable and stands for a whole story. It gains its importance
only because it is chosen among all the scenes that happen before and afterwards. This
scene seems so natural, that it doesn't even seem to be chosen: it has to be there.
Art always has to catch a whole sight or story, insight or memory into the space that the canvas provides. Seldomly, artists achieve to overcome the boundaries of time so easily. In Cuong's paintings we have to forget the Western concept of time that elapses or can be frozen in a frame. Here the chosen situation is in the same time a single moment and surpasses itself with a timeless general message. In most of Cuong's paintings it is impossible to say if he communicates a story of a unique situation or if the message is intended to go beyond as a general idea.
The Fairy Tale Teller
One friend of mine called Cuong the "Fairy Tale Teller". Cuong recently tends to paint ever more reduced. Fairy tales are simple, around their sometimes fantastic story is a lot of imaginative beauty. There is always a profound truth in them. The few things that are finally represented are the very essence of the story he tells, of the fairy-tale. There is a buffalo, there is a tree, there might be fish... Like the best from symbolism, the buffalo is the whole heritage of Vietnamese art, the tree is nature, the fish is the sea and the people that live with her.
In Cuong's paintings a single slim black line can tell the truth. One of his small, typical black lines can be just "right". In a classical manner the spectator feels, the few lines Cuong draws, always had to be there. Just there and nowhere else. This is, where Cuong resembles Bach: Bach's lines of melody are so simple and natural, one wouldn't think that they have been intellectually thought out. Everything around these lines, that would be decoration and unnecessarily divert the attention, is eliminated. The often uni-colored background in Cuong's paintings is like the harmonic background in Bach's work, gives a background with a C-Major or e-minor atmosphere. The orchestrated color, that gives the line of melody its appropriate surroundings.
Symbols in the tale
Once on the track of symbolism, we are looking for more symbols. And one starts counting. Frequently returning is the number three: houses, fish, birds, people, kites: regularly they appear as three, a central number of Buddhism - and Christianity. Reading Cuong's paintings this way, could give a hint. He admits, being a devout Buddhist. It might be somewhat apt to place his paintings in the art-scape of a Zen-garden. Finally, we look out for pagodas and temples. We find them, especially in the work before 1994.
Bearing
in mind the possible religious background, the work of Cuong proves what the German art
critic Rose-Maria Gropp had seen in the pictures: a great "peacefulness". The
pictures are balanced, they are quiet, they have a message of peace implanted. But do they
really?
On the first level, there is no sign of the historical past, of the wars against external
aggressors of the country, nor of the civil war. The foreigner always wants to see in
Vietnamese art and literature traces from the recent past, that has linked the West with
Vietnam so much, that "Vietnam" has become a notion of reference in Western
thinking. Most Westerners who come to Vietnam today, try to find something of their own
past in the country.
A certain peacefulness
Cuong is 33, born when the Americans started pulling in. He was 12, when they left. The Western observer is left to his own prejudice, when he expects pictures of the war. When we are surprised by Cuong's images of peace and balance, he might voluntarily hide a message about those bad times. The explicit non-expression of a subject can be telling. But we might be looking too much with Western eyes in this point.
Obviously Cuong represents the political and social context only in a highly reflected manner. The lighthearted spirit in his pictures gives testimony of a mature balance inside of the artist, and we can only assume from far that this is reached from a religious side. A critical thinker amidst daily politics wouldn't convey a message of internal balance. Or is this peacefulness hiding a message about the bad sides of life. Is he trying to get the spectator to just perceive the things he doesn't show?
An individual that doesn't show individuals
Something
else that has been striking me ever since I saw the first paintings of Cuong: In his
approach he denies the individual person. There are people appearing in his paintings.
They often show their back, seldomly have a face and if so, it has no individual traits.
Even down to the human being, Cuong seems to reflect only about things and beings in very
general terms, in ideas.
This is especially striking, when Cuong is seen as someone who defies the prescription of
group-behavior in the art-scene at home, who displays his skepticism for politically
unitarism through his behavior. But Cuong escapes political interpretation since he
escapes into the storytelling, into the myths that can have a double sense and deeper
meaning.
These observations might be coming a long way. Cuong seen through European eyes necessarily appears Western. In Europe, we put the hermeneutic circle around Cuong's work and discover with certainty only those things that we always wanted to see in them. Coung's place on our map of art would be somewhere between Klee and Klein. The only thing that can be said for sure: we might approach Cuong's work with European eyes, since we don't have others. To understand Cuong, it will need more. Hongkong, between East and West, might be the ideal place to understand more of his work.
If we come back to those people who would place Cuong's paintings in the children's room. There is a saying: a child always speaks the truth. Maybe the eyes of a child see more easily the simple truth, a truth that one can also find in art like Cuong's. It might be the same sensation that we feel, when walking with a child that points to many little details along the way and helps us to re-discover things, that we wouldn't notice otherwise.
Maybe Cuong shows us some of these little simple things along the way of life and expresses in this way some truth that goes beyond the day. It might be simple. It might be easy. It might seem simply natural. It might be things we wouldn't have noted otherwise.
Max Johns is a free-lance journalist and co-founder of asiArt.