The Brooklyn Rail

August 21, 2023

This past week I have been collaborating with the painter Frédéric Dialynas Sanchez, whom I met originally after one of my visits to Vietnam, where I have lived, exhibited several times and met with Vietnamese and returning Vietnamese (Việt Kiều 越僑) artists and produced writing on their work.

Artists have an obligation to expose themselves to the contemporary and considering this, I seem to have chosen Southeast Asia as it moves into the twenty-first century via authoritarian capitalism. This may be where an unconscious impulse towards historicizing intersects with sensibility. Whenever I am there, I think, no wonder I keep returning here, it’s where my work comes from.

Fred, who is part Vietnamese, has lived and worked in Saigon, Biên Hòa, and Hanoi. In France, where he is from, he studied under the French geometric abstract painter Bruno Rousselot and was an assistant to the painter Olivier Mosset, one of the members of the influential painting movement BMPT, who strove to make paintings rid of any hint of the artist’s subjectivity, to the point of sometimes making one another’s works.

In 2014, in Ho Chi Minh City, as the result of a residency at Sàn Art. Fred, as curator, installed a series of three monochrome red tondos, one by Mosset, one by Vương Tú Lâm, from Hanoi. the first monochrome painter in Vietnam, and one by a fictional monochromist that had exhibited at Gavin Brown. The exhibition was clearly an attempt to historicize via the advanced abstract painting. In his words, utilizing, “geometric abstraction and minimalist aesthetics” to cross-reference, via the three red paintings, the cultures of communism and Buddhism in Vietnam.

We collaborated, here in Paris, on several large paintings that became late inclusions in his current exhibition, entitled, Nhật Minh (daylight) He wrote that it,

...draws on popular cultures and Vietnamese craftsmanship to pay homage to the country of my ancestors. Daily reality (the world of the street, renovation and construction sites, vernacular architecture, markets) merges with other dimensions, spiritual, religious and existential; may testify to the beliefs of the people and their faith in the future.

It is an extensive pop-up show situated behind the VinFast showroom, where fleets of Vietnam-manufactured electric SUVs are displayed for sale on order. Its walls digitally project scenes from present-day urban Vietnam of night life, new skyscrapers and sunlit vistas.

Nhật Minh, behind a door in the rear, reveals a vast area, a former two-tiered supermarket. Taking up over 7,000 square feet with at least forty individual art objects or temporary assemblages by the artist and many collaborators, now myself included, along with dirty and dusty remnants of Saigon and Hanoi street vendors paraphernalia, the place features paintings by Fred that have been sewn together from the webbing that was used by the Viet Cong to underline their knapsacks so that it could not be so easily penetrated in battle (it has a distinctive dot pattern from the remnants of glue that held it to the knapsack fabric); other paintings he made from stretching vinyl signage taken from contemporary government propaganda billboards depicting an idyllic, prosperous Vietnamese life; and various semi-transformations of its urban street life, for instance, several sewn silk banners copied after construction tarpaulins. It was a successful frisson of how it feels to be there.

Our collaboration consisted of my attaching shaped canvas with gestural paint marks to lengths of variously striped and colored painted canvas whose thickness, distance and color was derived from awnings and vinyl coverings common throughout Asia.

This tandem project was based on our affinities and admiration for the encompassing bricolageuse in the Vietnamese practice of everyday life as well as agreement on how the painting can embody aspects of histories and cultures, as opposed to depicting them. We both understand the painting as containing potentials for locating practices, criticisms, places, situations, and references while minimizing the subjectivity of the individual artist. One can evoke what is happening in a specific place directly but also diffusely, utilizing repurposed materials and creating faux relics, but avoiding generalizations and universalities.

His VinFast sponsors show an ultra-modern, sophisticated Vietnam steeped in the technology of tomorrow to sell cars while Fred’s exhibition was closer to something Eugène Atget might understand in capturing the haptic, improvisatory Vietnam of the streets.

The current Tuan Andrew Nguyen exhibition, Radiant Remembrance at the New Museum and the upcoming An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières at MoMA, laudatory achievements, rely, for the most part, on imagist and narrative strategies to deliver historicist content.

Nhật Minh compares favorably but differently from these shows. With its context in the heart of the former colonizer’s capital, in a shotgun marriage to a showcase of Vietnamese consumerism, it has similar historicist aims but is a diverse bazaar of reportage in multiple layers. It has a lovely lightness for all its ambitious inclusiveness.