XL Arts

New gallery courts art from Vietnam

By V. Marc Fort
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, March 23, 2006

Entering the enormous wooden doors at the Congress Avenue gallery, a set of Buddha masks looms into view. The masks — easily the most overwhelming pieces in the exhibit at the still-new Fielding-Lecht Gallery — were created by Hanoi artist Dinh Cong Dat.

Dat playfully created positive and negative space molds out of plaster. Later, he painted a few of the positive-space masks as Buddha faces with gold-leaf, and conversely covered the majority of the negative-space Buddha faces with Western popular-culture material, cut from magazines and various media, the pated onto the masks.

Thanks to Bill and Pam Fielding — and their longtime friend, Suzanne Lecht, owner of Hanoi's Art Vietnam Gallery — our metropolis is now home to a spacious shop that specializes in Vietnamese fine art rarely found oustide New York, Paris, Los Angeles or that country still inextricably entangled with ours, Vietnam.

The gallery occupies the two-floor space at 708 Congress Ave. in the Edwards Tipps building. Its ambitious exhibit, "The Ten Courts of the Kings of Hell," transports the viewer directly to Hanoi, where the majority of the contributing artists reside. It includes folk art originating thousands of years ago and modern-day pop art from some of Vietnam's most important young artists.

Lecht, who led President Clinton on a 2001 gallery tour in Hanoi, is considered a pioneer and a leading authority on contemporary art in Vietnam.

"I arrived here with the solitary dream of working and living among the artists in Vietnam," Lecht explained in an e-mail from Hanoi. "It has been a journey of discovery, at times intensely personal, but always deeply rewarding."

"Ten Courts" was curated by Lecht, Pam Fielding and an Englishman living in Hanoi, Simon Redington. His folio of 10 aquatint etchings housed in lacquer boxes is a monolith of an installation and acts as the centerpiece of the exhibit.

"I didn't originate these drawings," Redington explained during the exhibit's opening reception. "I kept seeing them over and over in pagodas and temples as I was traveling through Vietnam. The mystical drawings originated with Buddhism in India and made their way along the Silk Road to China and Vietnam."

Redington's addition and singular artistic stamp to the long cultural history of drawing these solemn kings as they sit in judgment over recently deceased mortals was creating them as etchings instead of drawings. Likewise, Redington cleverly coupled his etchings in exquisite glass and wood casings with verses from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." His combination of Western prose and Eastern art yielded an uncanny synchronicity and an even deeper meditation on the earthly laws of causality.

"My favorite artist in the exhibit is Nguyen Nhu Y," Redington said.

Y painstakingly carved approximately 20 wood totems for the exhibit. The totems all bear a striking resemblance to Y's wife because he is consumed with carving her image over and over again as a tribute to her. Sadly, Y's life partner suffered from schizophrenia, as does Y, and she recently disappeared without a trace in the jungles of North Vietnam.

With the exhibit — and with the opening of the Fielding Lecht Gallery — lifelong art lovers Lecht and the Fieldings hope to continue to share the art of Vietnam with collectors around the world. The Vietnamese government's new policy of openness only provides more opportunity.

"The Vietnamese artists are striving to maintain their own cultural identity and yet they want to express a more universal art with universal concerns," Lecht said. "There will always be artists that remain deeply rooted in their own traditions and others who will seek new modes and manners of expression.

"It is my hope that the Vietnamese artists will have more opportunity to travel and interact with people of all nations," Lecht continued. "Vietnam has been a closed country for nearly 25 years. I would like to see the Vietnamese have their rightful place in the development of fine art around the world and to be collected by museums worldwide."