VAN GOGH in SAI GON - A Pop.Art Exihibition

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VAN GOGH in SAI GON

Van Gogh walked through life  witnessed it and clearly felt its shimmering beauty with an extremely sensitive soul. Seeing it, loving it, living it with solitude, and then express the loneliness out by words, by paintings with violent strokes. The body is here, the soul is here, and then put them all in the paintings so that the loneliness does not overflow. Oh, is his life an exile, or, like Christ, is it a painful sacrifice in order that sentient beings to realize the truth? That question has no definitive answer, because no one is the Christ to know what He felt when He was crucified. Nor was anyone Van Gogh to understand how much loneliness had exiled him. What remains, is the idea of bending down very low to fly high and the empathy to share the pain of fellow human beings. What remains are the letters of the heart, the Starry Night with their brilliant darkness, The Golden Wheat Fields in their solitude, the intense impasto strokes that are so distinctive.

With his sensitivity, Van Gogh always projects his eyes and soul to note the surrounding life into his paintings. He had done so with Nuenen, Paris, Arles, especially with Saint-Rémy, although for a short time. Even with the last 70 days of his life at Auvers-sur-Oise, Van Gogh didn't want to miss a thing. Therefore, despite being on earth for 37 years, in the last decade or so, he has composed more than 2,100 works, including about 860 oil paintings, most of which were painted in the last two years of his life. The works left behind are series of life perspectives marked with intense emotions from within.

Tran Trung Linh roams with life, jumping like a chamois on a rocky mountain. That chamois also separates himself from the crowd, being alone in his very own way, hanging on the rock. Those who are familiar with Linh clearly understand the passion for the beauty of painting inside Linh. Linh's paintings personality is strong, from expressionism to abstraction, but the strongest passion and biggest impression Linh creates are still pop-art with strong compulsions and very contemporary ideas. Linh’s also influenced deeply by Van Gogh. He appropriates Van Gogh icon into his Pop Art works. His works such as Spray for Peace with a background of sunflowers and a starry night by Van Gogh, or Van Meo's painting that also uses blue colors and impasto are the things that catch the eyes.

Linh also uses his sensitive soul to look at the lives around, in Saigon. These lives are visible everywhere here in the city, but they are only clearly seen when possessing a sensitive soul with a sympathy in a sense of compassion. In Saigon during the epidemic season, Linh created a set of digital paintings, highlighting the tolerance of suffering, the humanity in the crisis. It illustrated a quiet hand outstretched hand to give a hungry lunch box; a loving father carrying his children in a difficult life. These images depicted on those paintings not only create sympathetic emotions with simple emotions, they also make people think that the beauty of humanity is prevailed in spite the social situation.

Synchronicity generates ideas and passion. Appropriating Van Gogh's images as Pop Icons is a common practice of artists, and Linh often does so. Nonetheless, there’s a difference in the way Linh appropriates Van Gogh this time. Linh appropriates Van Gogh himself, Van Gogh's own soul, Van Gogh own’s eyes and using this soul and eyes to look at the surrounding life. With the sensibility, he painted them with feelings, passion, to honor the love of Van Gogh. Linh said: “Even now, in a little walk of Van Gogh in Saigon, one of thousands of different faces of the pop-art road, I want to relive the old way with a different perspective, just as simple, as Van Gogh himself, to love more, as the way his life has been devoted to this world, beautiful, ordinary, simple".

Different from the consumerism meaning of Pop in a modern society, which usually has the impression of communicating vanity, Pop icons in Linh’s appropriation of Saigon are what to cherish in everyday life. Those are ordinary, close to the life and to a sensitive soul. The Icons go from people, street corners, objects, shops. On that background of thinkings and feelings, Linh and Van Gogh went through what became Pop in the culture of Saigon. And in doing so, Linh’s appropriation is much softer and much more emotional. Let's take a walk with Linh in the very typical corners of Saigon in that appropriation. Each picture, each story, is the love from nearly 30 years of breathing the city's breath. Linh expresses it out with all sincerity, respect and even in the incarnation of Van Gogh.

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