Enter her solitude

Enter her solitudeBorn in Hanoi in 1978, Giang graduated from the Hanoi Fine Arts University in 2002. She has held solo exhibitions at Art Vietnam Gallery and L’Espace French Cultural Centre in Hanoi. She has also shown her work in the US as part of the exhibition Changing Identity: Recent works by Women Artists from Vietnam.

Art Vietnam’s current exhibition is an invitation to enter the strange and mysterious world of Ly Tran Quynh Giang.

According to Suzanne Lecht, director of Art Vietnam, this highly talented young artist is a force of nature itself. Reclusive by nature, Giang’s private sanctuary is “unabashedly bold while at the same time silently retrospective.”

She has never shied away from the complexities of life and would rather embrace the grey ambiguities from which others flee. Trained as a graphic artist, making woodcuts came naturally and freely to the young artist. Working purely from the feeling that nature brings to her, Giang lets the natural shape of the selected wood guide her inspiration into form.

The highly sculpted portraits provocatively stare at the viewer with an unflinching gaze. Owls, which fill the mouth, bees, that swarm over the body, imbue the works with an intensity from which no one can escape or ignore.

The use of the complex aesthetic beauty of the owl and the bee expresses the artist’s attraction to the contradictions of life. Dark and dangerous, foreboding and frantic, the intensity of these creatures creates a calmness in her world into which she can retreat.

Fragments of emotion are interwoven with concrete form creating a harmony within disharmony that engages the viewer and compels one to react, to investigate and to discover. This solitary world is not for the meek, it is for the seekers.