Pictures and mixed-media works of the avant-garde-artist Vu Dan Tan (1946-2009)
The position of Vietnam in the world changes rapidly and it is impossible to express this change artistically using only one medium – that is the reason why the internationally renowned artist Vu Dan Tan chose an innovative mixture of various media containing transcultural references in order to approach this topic.
On October 7 the exhibition will be opened at 6 PM at Goethe-Institut in the presence of the curator Iola Lenzi.
The exhibition “Vu Dan Tan and Music” was initiated by Goethe-Institut in order to celebrate his 70th birthday. It is organized in cooperation with the Vu Dan Tan Foundation, Hanoi and will be accompanied by an illustrated research catalogue. The visitors will be able to explore Vu Dan Tan’s love for music and how he connected music with his avant-garde visual art. The exhibition presents artworks which refer to music and some that use musical elements – most of these pieces have not been exhibited in Vietnam or any other country.
Vu Dan Tan’s works are on the one hand closely related to the traditional Vietnamese culture. On the other hand, they form a significant part of the contemporary Asian art which emerged in the 1970s. “Vu Dan Tan and Music” is a multi-media exhibition of the artist’s multi-facetted oeuvre: paintings, transformed objects, videos of musical performances and sound installations are part of the exhibition.
In the framework of the exhibition, the 10-people ensemble
Hanoi°Berlin will perform a
concert on October 22 at 8 PM. Among other songs, the musicians will play pieces which were developed specifically for this context, based on compositional drafts of Vu Dan Tan. The concert adds to the exhibition and shows that his oeuvre still has a huge impact on contemporary art, even after his death.
Vu Dan Tan (1946-2009) was a pioneer of contemporary Vietnamese art. He was born in 1946 in Hanoi and started to paint when travelling through Russia and Cuba. In 1990, he opened „Salon Natasha“ in Hanoi together with his wife Ms Natasha Kraevskaia – the first private gallery in Hanoi at that time. Tan worked in very small as well as very big dimensions and made use of a huge variety of materials.
Iola Lenzi is an art historian as well as a curator with a focus on South East Asian art, she is a Vu Dan Tan expert. Lenzi has already curated a large number of institutional exhibitions in Europe and Asia and engages with the regional, social, cultural and political systems. She lives in Singapore and teaches “Society and Politics in Asian Art” at the Singaporean Lasalle-Goldsmiths College of Arts”. Lenzi is the distributor and author of various exhibition catalogues within her field of studies.
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