In the Forest

Artists: Le Brothers | Curator: Nguyen Anh Tuan | Duration: 27/08/2023 - 29/10/2023

Preface

During the long years of one’s existence, one’s thoughts travels from their inner world to the outer world, and in reverse, one looks for anchoring reflections from the outer world to furnish their inner world.

Looking back at Le Brothers’ body of works, it can be seen that they are simply endless conversations between the internal world and external objects and phenomena, which are engaged in by two people who are individual characters sharing one artistic identity. These conversations are a continuous attempt at answering age-old yet evergreen questions: Who am I? (Projects Trước 86 - Before 86 2011, Dự án Đỏ - The Red Project 2013, Trò chơi - The Game 2013/15, 365 Ngày - 365 Days 2014). Where do I come from? (Projects Cây Cầu - The Bridge 2010, Những con số - The Number 2011, Ảo Ảnh - Illusion 2017/19). Each of these questions put forward a statement on circumstance and identity, to which art was used as a vehicle for the artists’ answers. A new question would then appear and resume this endless cycle. Completely different from the personal monologue of most artists, the reflection here occurred in the twin entities that share one common identity of Lê Brothers. The duo asked and simultaneously answered themselves through arguments, discussions, consensus, or suspicions. They do so in order to wander through contemplations on origins, on personal and communal histories, on faith and ideals, on the past and present. They interpreted their answers in the forms of spatially and temporally multidimensional visual arts: a series of thematic paintings which were pursued until completion, photography combined with long-running performances, field performances that corresponded to a project’s ideas and interactive-improvisational performances that corresponded to the contexts and spaces of different locations, interpretations and transformations using moving images in video and multimedia forms. 

In the Forest, their most recent project, is an exception to their previous practices. While it is a conversation between the duo and the external world, unlike their previous works, it looks at the entities existing in the external world as subjects existing alongside the artists, not just a pretext to reflect a mind-body-spirit’s narrative.

“How old are you, tree?”

This question emerged from the mind of the two artists and frequently made its reappearances during numerous long trips, first to the forests in the Northern part of the Trường Sơn Mountain Range in the West of Thừa Thiên Huế Province, and subsequently to the more distant forests of other countries and continents. Stepping into an old forest, sitting under the canopy of ageless ancient trees, the shape of nature starts to spring forth internally, engraving its images into one’s headspace. Nature has always been there, but only then was it discovered. It’s a nature of both external and internal existences, which largely goes unrecognized, for an average person is often overwhelmed by the great vastness and richness of a natural landscape. This sentiment has been perfectly articulated by Martin Heidegger: “... ‘Nature’ is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind 'in the sails'. As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand...”[1]

[1] Source: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time.

[2] Source: John Berger, Ways of Seeing.

[3] Source: “The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.” ― Theodor W. Adorno.

“How old are you, tree?”

This question is not just a question - it is also a recognition, the beginning of an awareness. A person receives basic information through the five senses provided by one's ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and bodily touches. Awareness, however, arrives by the way of intuition, directly through emotional patterns from which a metaphysical form of the subject is formed. This is how the presence of a subject becomes “known”. Center our interest and curiosity around an external thing is how we start developing awareness of a subject, how we approach the awareness of a subject. It’s recognizing the existence of an entity, of a life, of a pattern, and of a larger ecosystem existing alongside you, within which you are only a small individual. “Seeing” is “recognizing” - a recognition of both the subject and the identity that exists in the presence of both you and the subject, as John Berger once said: “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”[1] That is the start of this new series of creations, which was initiated to interpret the feelings stemmed from the recognizing. Recognizing that Forest as an entity existing concurrently with the (twin) identity of the artists. Recognizing one’s existence within that quiet, lush, and vast identity. In the Forest is a continuous visual interpretation of the consciousness-led sentiments evoked by places, and therefore it is without regards for neither the quantity nor the end point. 

Started in 2021, In the Forest first materialized as a series of large oil-on-canvas paintings, which then turned into painted antique door and chest frames, which were treated like painting surfaces with their corresponding three-dimensional textures and heavy materials, following by moving-image videos filmed during their Forest Trips. The large-size horizontal oil paintings have no beginning nor ending. Their surfaces are composed of crisscrossing strips of colors of different shades, from warm and brilliant to cold and dark. The paintings were created in the signature creative style of Lê Brothers: the duo took turn working on the expanses of colors to alternatively recited their emotions and awareness of the Forest, of being in the Forest. This recitation was presented in a continuous dialogue, a constant narration. In this sharing of the duo’s awareness and emotions about nature, the connectedness of the emotions was transformed into the motions of paintings, splashing, scratching, sanding, caressing, which created the various shifting of the paintings’ surfaces, shifting that were passed back and forth between the two artists. Their continuous ‘conversation’ on the paintings formed unending, layered, dense, ever-evolving strips of colors that run vertically - like a dense, multi-layered atmosphere of emotions that is both growing and rotting, brought to the artists by the Forest. From the canvas, this state of color spread to the antique wooden frames, to materials created by human hands and the indentations of time, like the forest growing and spreading to overtake what is left behind. Staged across space in a non-linear manner, without any specific orientation to guide the viewers, the art objects made by human hands in combination with the natural objects of trees, water, and animals aimed to construct and express the artists’ feelings about nature, while developing a dialogue between nature and anyone who would step into the space.

 On how the project was conceived, Le Brothers said:

“How old are you, tree?” - This question materialized from the emotions we immediately felt when we touched the trunk of an ancient tree in an old-growth forest. And it also came from deep within us, from some secret corner of our subconsciousness, like an echo from a distant root, a link that has been lost to us. Everyone has a place of origin, a lineage, an identity, a history, a starting point and a destination. So where does nature come from and where does it go? What is nature? Is it the living environment that nourishes all beings? Or is it another living entity of which other beings are bodily parts - cells that constitute nature?”

 The philosopher Adorno once exalted art for having a more truthful and less dubious capability to reflect history than any objective documents[2]. Following this line of thought, In the Forest can be considered a contribution to the history of conversations between the stream of human consciousness and nature. And this curatorial note, which is an attempt at delineating a vague path to the ideas and labor presented by the artist duo to their audiences, would like to borrow the words of I. Kant, “Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature”. I would like to invite you to perceive and experience Nature and search for your own dialogue through these new artistic reflections of Le Brothers.

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