Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition, ‘One Endless Summer’ features 25 artworks from across Đỗ Trọng Quý’s articulation of toys and their physical appearance. Inspired by one-liner jokes, 25 pieces of art featured by Do Trong Quy are large-scale paintings are still life landscapes of mixed playfulness and subtle irony, depicting the mundane woes of human life. For the past year, Quý has incorporated imagery from his toy collection – including cars, boats, animals, and tiny people – into landscapes of household objects, creating dramatic encounters in the capricious world of figures. Embracing the dynamic culture of the past decade in Hanoi, the exhibited paintings stand as critical links between Vietnamese young adults and art. Urban teenagers at the time quickly caught on the MTV wave and enriched the city’s spirit with new, attentive, and exuberant styles. Quý was one among the emo kids, or the post-Đổi Mới romanticists. In these compositions in which all painterly competencies occur together, there is an impression that the artist is daydreaming about elusive scenes, seeking closure in uncertainty. The world of Quý’s toys is a binary world of figuration and abstraction, where placement of the toys retains an aesthetic appeal as ‘still life painting,’ while at the same time forms a complete bond between the objects. One can only adore these landscapes from afar: they incessantly seize the fate of everything within them. Modern loneliness is obscure, and conscious separateness makes a prison. The artist chooses an assertion of the everyday life to lavish his scrutiny on small objects to offer other narratives to the commonplace. Quý’s toys are indeed an equivalence with the most celebrated of objects.

(Words by Nguyen Quynh Chi)

Quynh-Chi Nguyen (b. 2000, Hanoi) is a junior majoring in art & architecture history at Miami University, Ohio, with minors in studio art and communication design. Her research interests include image, social media, identity politics, and critical theory at the cross-section of visual studies and cultural production. During her gap year, she has navigated through the Hanoi art scene, working closely among emerging artists and young curators. She will spend the last two years in college as an undergraduate humanities fellow to investigate the persistence of racism in its cultural, political, and institutional forms, and then to continue her exploration of Vietnamese contemporary art theories.

Download Exhibition Catalogue