A solo exhibition
Illusion
Curator: Nguyen Anh Tuan | Artist: Le Brothers | Duration: 18/07/2021 - 15/08/2021
Curatorial Statement
Words by Curator Nguyen Anh Tuan
Illusion is the name of the latest art project of Le Ngoc Thanh and Le Duc Hai, as known as Le Brothers, a pair of twin artists originally from Quang Binh province but living and working in the city of Hue for the past 20 years. Illusion is not a separate project but belongs to a series of artistic conceptual stations created by the Le Brothers over the years on major topics: Violence, History, Connections, and placing them in the thought realm formed by the constant collision of real life. This is the most recent artistic series of reflections, initially called “the sorrow of war” but rapidly develops to encompass a broader meaning, or adopt an approach looking more at the depth, that talks about the connotation of violence across historical layers and “disassemble” - placing them in contexts of dialogue with contemporary material and awareness, as well as holds the potential to transform into a variety of visual arts and multimedia languages.
This exhibition showcases series of large-scale paintings and six big ceramic jars, marking the first stop of a long-term project. The paintings are processed using lacquer painting techniques, yet do not depend too much on traditional techniques but combine many methods and natural and industrial materials to create the ultimate visual effect. Using toile as a flat surface and intentionally lay layers of drawn figures: the first layer is the reconstructed figures based on surveys and memories from ancient buildings in Hue, carvings on the Nine Tripod Cauldrons, animals and mascots, violent weapons and objects, modern home furniture; and covered by the second layer which is a continuous pattern of fire clouds, waves, fish scales or bars influenced by architectural carvings, royal objects transformed based on the interaction with the figures in the first layer.
Ceramic jars are another approaching direction of putting the 2D surface painting on 3-dimensional objects. The jar is a common object in normal life of the people living in the Middle of Vietnam, used to contain all necessities: water, rice, salt, fish sauce etc. This series of jars, started by Le Brothers at the end of 2018, is the second step of the project to transform images onto objects, especially those associated with historical and cultural life. Illusion will overlay its curtain on many other objects in the next phases of the project: beds, crates, cabinets, trays, counters, chairs… to explores the interplay between artistic behavior on historical objects-artifacts and local identity while maintaining the consistency of ideas. These jars are not quite contemporary Nine Cauldrons, but they still bring in the idea of gathering physical and emotional dialogues through the past to present in order to convey a distinct aesthetic taste in an ancient form.
Going beyond the boundary of restrictive practices based on art form such as painting or pottery bound by mechanical manipulations on a material basis, “Illusion” shows a performance of thinking with disagreements, ambiguity, questions, and reflections of two individuals reflected back and forth, and art is the end result. The continuity of the idea is developed in a reciprocal contradiction of the argument in a particular way of the Le twins, which does not see this series of work as final, but which provides possibilities for transition to various modes of expression, both material and conceptual, to create more layered combinations of scenery and light, violence and dominance, lurking concepts and fuzzy formations, glorious past and devastating present. These searches and questions are not intended to chase the past, but to let the past rebirth in the context of the theater of reality (according to Walter Benjamin), to seek the ultimate meaning of the essential reason for its existence. Remnant, still visible and mobile in our surroundings and ideas in this ephemeral reality, and art, remains a multilayered and nuanced medium for illuminating contemporary human emotional complexities.
