Bui Cong Khanh | Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-wood Grenades

P O R C E L A I N M E DA LS AND JACKFRUIT-WOOD GRENADES

THE AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM EXAMINED THROUGH THE ART OF

BÙI CÔNG KHÁNH

Curated by Iola L en zi

The American War in Vietnamese contemporary art and BUi COng KhAnh’s Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-wood Grenades

Iola Lenzi

Vietnam’s Second Indochina War, known in Vietnam as the American War— in the USA, the Vietnam War—ended more than two generations ago when northern forces took Saigon on 30 April, 1975. The two-decade conflict emblematised Cold-War geopolitics of the second half of the twentieth century, polarising the world, and becoming a symbol for contesting the status quo at a time of growing frustration with governments unresponsive to popular will. In Southeast Asia, the hostilities and subsequent Vietnamese communist victory were used as cautionary outcomes to vindicate right-leaning national governments’ repressive tendencies—among the bloodiest was Indonesia’s 1965 leftist purge that claimed up to a million victims.1 On the other end of the ideological spectrum, Cold-War maneuvering linked to the Vietnamese struggle was tied to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge genocide 1975-1979.

Outside Vietnam, the War’s complex ramifications have engendered much analysis and a variety of cultural responses.2 In Vietnam itself however, for political reasons, rigorous critical study can’t be assumed—Vietnamese accounts still downplay the conflict’s fratricidal aspect and other complexities in favour of a narrative of external aggression.3 In the general population, once North-South reunification was achieved, beyond celebrating victory and the national spirit, citizens refrained from overly critical dissection of the War. Hanoi writer Bao Ninh’s 1991 novel The Sorrow of War, an unvarnished account of the civil contest’s brutality and futility from a North Vietnamese soldier’s perspective, though not banned in Vietnam, proved controversial, with only a few thousand copies officially printed and distributed.

Hanoi intellectual Duong Tuong said of the novel ‘It was the first truthful book about the War. The writing about the war was mainly speeches about heroism and patriotism — the positive side of the War (…)’.4 Today, the population’s limited interest in events decades ago may be ascribed to time, since three quarters of Vietnamese citizens were born after the conflict’s conclusion.

1 Notably in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand.

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Ang Cheng Guan and Joseph Chinyong Liow, “The fall of Saigon: Southeast Asian perspectives”, Brookings Institute Report, April 21, 2015 https://www.brookings.edu/ opinions/the-fall-of-saigonsoutheast-asian-perspectives/ accessed 17/12/18

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Bennett Murray, “Why Vietnam isn’t talking about 1968”, Politico, 18/2/2018 https://www. politico.eu/article/why-vietnamisnt-talking-about-1968/ accessed 18/12/2018.

4 All publishing in Vietnam is state-vetted. Duong Tuong in Suzanne Goldenberg, “Why Vietnam’s best-known author has stayed silent”, The Guardian, 19.11.2006, online https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2006/nov/19/books. booksnews accessed 18.12.2018

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Visual art’s approach to the War

5 Following doi moi market opening after 1986, USled sanctions were lifted in 1994, heralding a decade of extraordinary growth and poverty-reduction.

In visual art, apart from nation-acclaiming images produced by regime-friendly artists, few have dared the War’s critical assessment. An exception was Tran Trung Tin’s (1933-2008) late-war paintings. His 1972 gouaches-on-newspaper Darling with Gun, depicting a stylised, glazed-expression gun-toting woman, in their heterodox material, childish pictorial style, and disturbing figuration of stunned incomprehension, can be read as a critically-thoughtful response to the conflict. (fig 1) More recent artworks referencing the War have adopted safe, memorialising approaches or surrealism, such as Nguyen Manh Hung’s (b. 1976) warplane pictures. (fig 2) In the doi moi era, the dearth of art critically scrutinising the conflict is surprising since its life-altering consequences for the Vietnamese continue today. Indeed, winning the War resulted in Vietnam’s punishment with crippling trade sanctions. These caused Subsidy Period economic instability and near famine that played a part in doi moi economic reforms that changed Vietnamese society fundamentally in the 1990s.5 Only a handful of artists have tackled the topic beyond mere picturing. Among these is Bui Cong Khanh (b.1972).

Fig 1 Tran Trung Tin Darling with Gun Gouache on newspaper, 1972 Fig 2 Nguyen Manh Hung Sunrise On the South China Sea Oil on canvas, 2009

Bui Cong Khanh’s socially-engaged practice Bui Cong Khanh’s two-decade multimedia performance-slanted practice interrogates the social, cultural and political status quo in Vietnam, sometimes exploring transnational linkages such as those of Vietnam-China and VietnamFrance. Its investigation of Vietnam-sensitive contradictions of the doi moi era, including economic inequality, social exclusion, state surveillance, and the government’s manipulation of Vietnam-China relations is politically daring. The Past Moved (2010) and Saigon Slum (2013) elliptically and through audience-involving strategies give voice to Saigon shanty-town dwellers’ improbable contestation of urban development depriving them of their neighborhoods and homes (figs 3, 4). Fortress Temple of 2015, using history as its starting point, scrutinises China Fig 3 (Left) Bui Cong Khanh The Past Moved Charcoal on paper mock photo studio as participative installation, 2010.

Fig 4 (Right) Bui Cong Khanh Saigon Slum Participative installation, 2013.

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and Vietnam’s ancient cultural enmeshing, in tandem with their complex power relationship today, to train a critical eye on both nations as they advance agendas not necessarily serving their citizens (fig 5).6 Citizens’ negotiation with power is an continuing thread in Khanh’s work, and though seeded in a Vietnamese context, resonates outside Vietnam. Though grappling with tendentious topics, Bui Cong Khanh’s conceptually-structured pieces, usually beginning with the interrogation of an idea, combine an original, often poetic aesthetic, story-telling, and savvy deployment of media, disciplines, and materials to simultaneously thwart the censors and mobilise viewers. Pieces frequently engender audience physical involvement, thus ensuring active engagement rather than passive gazing.

Moreover Khanh’s selection of materials and techniques associated with familiar local vernacular, provides plural audiences, not necessarily versed in art, clues for reading multi-layered works.

Khanh and the American War Khanh has been thinking about his country’s civil conflict for many years. In 2016 he produced his room-scaled carved jackfruit-wood shelter installation Dislocation incorporating military imagery chiseled by Hoian craftsmen.7 Khanh, who grew up in Danang south of the 17th parallel that marked the pre-1975 North-South Demarcation Line, was a small child in 1975, without memories of the conflict. Yet he has long been puzzled by its contradictory representation: official accounts, learned at school, described grand vision and glorious sacrifice. This narrative was divorced from war stories heard at home: hardship, separation, danger, absent control over one’s destiny. Khanh’s father was enlisted by the southern army to work at the American base in Danang. Though not ideologically committed, only concerned with his family’s survival, post-war Khanh’s father was sent to reeducation camp. During this absence, the family struggled even as Khanh notes, Vietnamese people, whether from North or South, spoke of the War in clichés, devoid of personal interpretation. Today, the artist observes, few mention the conflict, as if doi moi and its culture of money and competition had erased it.

Maturing and deepening his thinking about the American War since 2016, and now pondering its complex web of contemporary implications, the artist has created a new corpus Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-wood Grenades.

Fig 5 Bui Cong Khanh Fortress Temple Detail of a larger corpus of work 2015, painted porcelain vase.

6 Fortress Temple, exh. cat (Hong Kong: Chancery Lane Gallery, 2015).

Shown at the Factory, Saigon, 2016, and subsequently at the 5th Singapore Biennale, 2016.

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Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-wood Grenades Conceived as a single-room exhibition put up at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, in late 2018, Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-wood Grenades is the culmination of Bui Cong Khanh’s several years’ reflection on unresolved tensions emerging from the War and its aftermath seen from a doi moi vantage point. In Vietnam, forty years on, North-South distrust persists, albeit masked.

Can opposing war narratives be reconciled? Philosophical questions surrounding the quantification and reward for sacrifice haven’t been answered. And the postwar purging of some, not others, hasn’t been explained. Expanding from the

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Vietnamese context, the work also examines authority’s role vis-à-vis individuals in war.

Iola Lenzi, “Negotiating Home History and Nation”, in Negotiating Home History and Nation: two decades of contemporary art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011, edited Lenzi, (Singapore: SAM 2011)1819; and Lenzi, “Lost and found: tracing pre-modern cultural heritage in Southeast Asian contemporary art”, in Connecting Art and Heritage (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2013) 127-131.

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Presented as an immersive room installation, the piece comprises two components that can be experienced together or separately. The first is a set of traditional furniture made of jackfruit-wood, a precious, non-industrial timber indigenous to Vietnam, completed by ambitiously large-scale porcelain vases. The second component is a set of several hundred moulded, hand painted and gilded porcelain medals. The ceramic vessels, hand-painted and fired by Bui Cong Khanh in Bat Trang, the ancient imperial kiln village outside Hanoi, fall into a line of practice begun by the artist a decade ago and first exhibited at the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6) in 2009. Painted ceramic vessels in Bui Cong Khanh’s expressive repertoire in turn take their place in a longer art historically-documented thread of Vietnamese contemporary art that, from the 1990s, deployed porcelain as critical vernacular clue, notably seen in Nguyen Van Cuong’s (b. 1972) 1999-2001 Porcelain Diary.8 Unlike the ceramics however, the furniture in this exhibition, conceptualised by the artist and built and carved by a Hoian master cabinet-maker, marks a departure in Khanh’s practice both in form and function. Chairs, tables and screens are utilitarian and designed for viewers’ usage. In this respect Jackfruit-wood Grenades’ viewerengagement through the conflation of beauty and pedestrian usage perpetuates Southeast Asian contemporary art’s encroachment into the everyday living space as a means of mobilising audience attention.

North-South cohabitation: room-as-nation The room installation mimics a traditional Vietnamese interior to uncover NorthSouth strain and personal memory’s frequent contradiction of official historical narratives, both traced to the War. Khanh probes these two stresses by producing ceramics and hand-carved chairs (Northern Chair, Southern Chair), table (The Wound Has Not Healed), screens, and an ancestor altar and accoutrements, all imbedded with military iconography—realistically depicted and scaled grenades, riffles, uniforms, barbed-wire, medals. Both northern and southern army paraphernalia feature recognisably in the jackfruit-wood carving, their balanced inclusion metaphorically serving to both confront and reconcile North and South Vietnam. The altar table, its scale indicating domestic rather than temple-use, is also a unifying and constant element. State-written war histories often occlude certain individuals and their sacrifice, and for nationalistic purpose, eclipse ideological grey zones surrounding conflict. Such ambiguous grey zones, once grasped by both sides, provide nuance that softens adversarial stances. Khanh’s carved altar table and wall-panel (Northern Heritage), equally referencing North and South, through associative connotations, counter simplistic, binary versions of

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history that encourage polarisation. Pervasive in homes throughout the country, pre-war and post-war, and alluding to pan-Vietnam ancestor memorialisation in the intimate family setting, the altar is deliberately selected by Khanh as a shared and peaceful social space for grey-zone unpacking.

Two pairs of floor vases (Shooting Target (1, 2) and After the War (1, 2) ) shaped like missiles, aesthetically weighty with their midnight blue and gold, and adorned with barbed wire motifs and dart-boards, signal war directly, unconcerned by one side or another. Another pair, titled North and South, is Vietnam-specific, each naturalistically-painted with a similar fighting coq or chicken—a traditional sport popular throughout Vietnam. The vessel faces, in their depiction of similar Vietnamese fighting cocks, suggest the fratricidal nature of the American War. The back faces are respectively adorned with a Southern military jacket, and a Northern one. In his picturing of disposable, utilitarian, and interchangeable clothing to signify factional opposition, Khanh can be seen as querying the War’s ongoing dividing effect. In their installation to the altar’s right and left, formal symmetry, and iconographic cousinage, this pair elliptically speculates on the constructed nature of the North-South breach that has split the country for decades.

Bui Cong Khanh’s installation doesn’t dispute the importance of ideology.

Rather, by locating the two opposing sides metaphorically in a single, intimate, domestic interior connoting civilised living through elegant furniture familiar to all Vietnamese, the work questions state agendas’ construction of history in defiance of truth no different to superpower geopolitical ideological hyperbole decades ago. Today, the work obliquely asks, can citizens not find common cause against abuse of power, corruption, and social inequality pervasive throughout Vietnam in the doi moi era?

Porcelain Medals While Vietnam-specific, opposite war narratives have troubled Khanh for years, a more universally-relevant conflict-related question is that of official recompense for service and sacrifice. Khanh began collecting vintage war medals in Vietnam and Europe a decade ago, his attraction to their aesthetic conjoined with skepticism about the constructed significance of the medal-as-reward-for-bravery, or defeating enemies, an action possibly involving violence (fig 6). Medals are attractive decorations that may stand for something ugly. They are designed to be worn and exhibited with pride, yet may represent behavior the medal-holder isn’t proud of. What then is the true value of the conventionally-prized medal? During the Subsidy Period near-famine of the late 1970s-early 1980s, when his family was subsisting on a bowl of rice a day, the artist recalls his mother lamenting that his father’s army medals, and children’s merit certificates, had no value since they couldn’t be eaten.9 Other kinds of symbolic reward such as badges and insignias

Fig 6 Military medals: Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam); USA; Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam)

9 For a Hanoi case-study of this period’s food shortages, Melinda Tria Kerkvliet, “The food problem in Hanoi during the subsidy period: how workers coped” Southeast Asia Research Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 2011) 83-106.

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dispensed by institutional authority—schools; factories; village associations—may be equally vacuous, a valueless government currency of propaganda. In Vietnam pre-doi moi, such tokens were intrinsic to authority’s relationships with citizens as substitutes for material incentives. Today, they continue to be distributed, just as the official war narrative remains little modified.

Khanh’s porcelain medals, like his vases, were produced in Bat Trang. Made in a large series of several hundred, they are the artist’s playful but deeply serious meditation on the self-serving, propagandist aspect of official reward. Khanh’s medals are fictional hybrids of American, North and South Vietnamese, French, Russian, and Chinese military insignias. In their exaggerated numbers and whimsical decoration, they counter real medals’ preciousness and association with a specific feat or sacrifice. Designing 7 distinct moulds, Khanh manufactured hundreds of biscuit porcelain medals which he then hand-painted and gilded such that most are individualised—single-colour ones are the only repetitions. Singly, the porcelain medals are jewel-like: delicate press-moulded relief details, lustrously glassglazed, finely painted, and lusciously coloured to present an aesthetically-pleasing whole. Khanh leaves the medals’ installation and display open, underscoring their conceptual strength, whatever their presentation. Opting to mound them in their hundreds like common pebbles, this curator played-up volume to underline the mass fabrication (or cheapening) of reward that is supposed to be as precious as the sacrifice recompensed. Porcelain Medals’ bijoux aesthetic and delicate porcelain also translate them as faux medals, this falseness further undermining the validity and necessity of war. In their subversion of battle medals by artistic means, Khanh’s Porcelain Medals point to the distance between the abstraction of soldiers-as-cogs in a vast war machine serving nationalist interests, and very tangible and real risk of injury or death.

By producing visually-exquisite medals from breakable porcelain, and elegant precious timber furniture adorned with realistic grenades and riffles —prettiness, delicacy, and elegance the opposite of war— Khanh’s installation disturbs as viewers take in the disconnect between form and content. This disturbance is the trigger of audience exchange and critical reaction.

Materials, techniques, and setting as legible critical language Khanh’s installation draws viewers into a thinking conversation about the War and its consequences through utilisation and experience. To achieve this, he allies materials, techniques, signs, and construction tactics specifically to involve audiences. The everyday room-setting with its ancestor altar is familiar and inviting, as are carved wood and ceramics, materials with deep roots in Vietnamese vernacular culture, and in everyday-circulation all around the country. By marrying military emblems of both North and South in his functional living-room setting

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where viewers are encouraged to touch and sit, Khanh engenders quizzing of the internecine aspect of the old struggle, challenging animosities’ foundations. Civil conflicts are particular in forcing losers and winners to co-habit after the peace. If in the Vietnamese case post-war life was experienced differently in Saigon and Hanoi as defeated southerners were punished by the victorious North, then despite imbalance, all Vietnamese were victims of war. Khanh, as above, experienced this imbalance personally due to his family history, yet transcends his own story to consider the civil conflict’s complexities and loose ends affecting all Vietnamese.

His installation, open to everyone, is a conduit for shared transcendence through the sensuality and evocative power of art. Barbed-wire carving—emblematizing violence everywhere, and therefore North-South neutral—adorning a table titled The Wound Has Not Healed, doesn’t merely decorate its surface, but rather, embedded in the timber, and thus tactile, compels audience touch as a means of healing human communion (fig 7). Beyond his own gaze, the artist seeks to coopt viewers, especially those without knowledge of the conflict, to draw their own conclusions about the War and its implications. Materials, techniques, and locallyrooted social constructs such as ancestor worship, used in conceptual ways, help attain this goal.

Fig 7 Bui Cong Khanh Detail of The Wound Has Not Healed, 2018.

The American War’s critical scrutiny in contemporary Vietnamese practice: art historical precedent Bui Cong Khanh’s grappling with the American War has art historical precedent.

Earlier projects that revolved around the conflict were Dinh Q. Le’s (b. 1969) Damaged Genes of 1998 (fig 8), and Vu Dan Tan’s (1946-2009) USA/Vietnam transnational conceptual installation-performance, co-produced with Le Hong Thai (b. 1966), RienCarNation of 1999-2000 (fig 9).10 Both works engage with the Fig 8 (Left) Dinh Q. Le Damaged Genes Participative Installation, Saigon, 1998.

Fig 9 (Right) Vu Dan Tan RienCarNation and Icarus/ Cadillac Installation, Pacific Bridge, Oakland, CA, 1999.

War’s repercussions, Tan’s proposing that viewers critically assess the results of victory in the doi moi era, Dinh’s more directly activist in recalling the long-lasting but in the 1990s still under-publicised human and ecological devastation caused

by US military spraying of toxic Agent Orange in Vietnam during the War.11 Damaged Genes is a series of two-headed conjoined-twin dolls that effective for being simultaneously innocent and monstrous, focuses on a specific repercussion

Damaged Genes was installed in Saigon by the artist in a kiosk of the International Shopping Center for a month.

RienCarNation was produced at Pacific Bridge, in Oakland, CA, during a joint residency by Vu Dan Tan and Le Hong Thai in 1999.

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11 Agent Orange was the dioxin-laced chemical defoliant sprayed by US military personnel on Vietnamese jungles 1962-1971 in a bid to hinder Viet Cong warfare and food supply among others.

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of the War, health problems emblematized by children’s deformities caused by prenatal exposure to defoliant. RienCarNation, about critical thinking, for its part tackles philosophical questions arising from shifting discourses of history and these narratives’ plurality.

Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 19541965, University of California Press, 2013. http://www.jstor. org.ezlibproxy1.ntu.edu.sg/ stable/10.1525/j.ctt3fh30f. pp.

96 and 110-114, accessed 2112-2018.

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Arguing RienCarNation as fundamentally innovating doi moi in art, see Iola Lenzi, “Seductive Amazons and Liberated Icons”, in Vu Dan Tan and Nguyen Quang Huy, exh. cat. (Singapore: Atelier Frank & Lee, 2001) and “Urbane Subversion: empowerment, defiance and sexuality in the art of Vu Dan Tan”, in 12 Contemporary artists of Vietnam, ed. Trang Dao Mai (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2010) 30-31. And Iola Lenzi, “Vu Dan Tan’s Cadillac performance RienCarNation: Rethinking Communist Vietnam’s 1975 Victory”, unpublished paper, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2015.

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RienCarNation comprised a 1961 California-sourced Cadillac that was painted gold, provided with wing cut-out from the car’s body, and imported from the United States to Vietnam where Vu Dan Tan proposed to drive Icarus/Cadillac through the narrow streets of Hanoi. The plan was derailed when Vietnamese customs officials confiscated the car’s engine on arrival in Haiphong port. The engine-deprived Cadillac was then installed on a flatbed truck which, Tan at the wheel, paraded through the city to Gia Lam. This performance would have astonished most Hanoians who, barely familiar with cars, would likely never have seen, except in movies, a vast vintage Cadillac. Icarus/Cadillac was more than spectacle however: as the quintessential emblem of American consumer culture (underlined by its ostentatious gold) the Cadillac harboured an ironic subtext suggesting capitalist America’s defeat of Vietnam on the ideological front, despite the smaller nation’s much-vaunted military victory. Vu Dan Tan’s artistic intention, in confronting Hanoians with a vintage Cadillac, may also have been to provide clues to the War since the car’s 1961 production date coincided historically with a turn towards US military escalation in Vietnam.12 RienCarNation as a performative installation thus proposed a re-thinking of historic outcomes that no longer positioning Vietnam as a winner, subverted the official narrative. The work’s conceptual sophistication and urban circulation spared it censorship, and as I have previously argued, made RienCarNation/Icarus an emblematic work of doi moi in art in its formal-conceptual grappling with the war’s many implications for the Vietnamese people in the renovation era (fig 10).13

Fig 10 Vu Dan Tan Icarus/Cadillac on a flat-bed truck Public area performance, Hanoi, 2000.

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More recently Dinh Q. Le has examined other aspects of the conflict in works such as From Vietnam to Hollywood of 2003-2005, The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006), and his Documenta 13 drawing and video installation of 2012, Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War.

Four decades after reunification, and three decades after doi moi, how do the Vietnamese perceive their American War and its sacrifices? In Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-wood Grenades, Bui Cong Khanh tests audience thinking on the conflict’s paradoxes and strains by scoping these through a direct and intimate artistic lens. By inviting viewers to sit in his North-South-referencing living room, gather around his North-South altar, and handle his fragile and exquisite invented porcelain medals, Khanh involves all in forward-looking questions evolved from the past’s why and how. From Central Vietnam, Khanh endorses neither the North’s nor South’s wartime position. Rather, in his utilisation of indigenous jackfruit tree hardwood, and porcelain rooted in millennia-old Vietnamese tradition, Khanh puts pan-Vietnam-familiar and appreciated materials and cultural tropes to the service of conveying difficult ideas and queries. Taking the public history of war into the privacy of home, and implanting clues into his installation’s constructed domestic setting, Bui Cong Khanh shines light on thorny and often ignored NorthSouth differences. Though born out of the Vietnamese context, Bui Cong Khanh’s installation, like many of his works, operates transnationally. Framing war in such an intimate, personal way challenges viewers of other times and geographies to re-consider the necessity of armed conflict.

December 2018

Iola Lenzi is a Singapore art historian-curator specialising in contemporary Southeast Asian art. Also holding a law degree, through her exhibitions and publications Lenzi charts transnational Southeast Asian art-historical discourses predicated on regional practices’ critical dialogue with history, society, and power. She has curated numerous institutional exhibitions of Southeast Asian art in Asia and Europe, and teaches graduate Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art history in Singapore.

She has collaborated curatorially with Bui Cong Khanh on group and solo projects since 2008.

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Northern Chair 2018 Hand-carved Jackfruit Wood 98 x 44 x 44 cm 17

Southern Chair 2018 Hand-carved Jackfruit Wood 98 x 44 x 44 cm 18

The Wound Has Not Healed 2018 Hand-carved Jackfruit Wood 78.5 x 104 x 67.5 cm 21

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Folding Screen 2018 Hand-carved Jackfruit Wood 165 x 140 x 5 cm 24

Altar Table 2018 Hand-carved Jackfruit Wood 114 x 50 x 101 cm 27

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Northern Heritage 2018 Hand-carved Jackfruit Wood 188.5 x 122.5 x 5 cm 30

Colonial Cloud 2018 porcelain, hand-painted 182 x 50 cm 33

Four Mythological Creatures 2018 porcelain, hand-painted 182 x 50 cm 34

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North 2018 porcelain, hand-painted 140 x 34 cm 37

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South 2018 porcelain, hand-painted 140 x 34 cm 39

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Shooting Target (1) 2018 porcelain, hand-painted 131 x 40 cm 43

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Shooting Target (2) 2018 porcelain, hand-painted 131 x 40 cm 45

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After The War (1) 2018 porcelain, hand-painted with gold 113 x 34 cm 47

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After The War (2) 2018 porcelain, hand-painted with gold 113 x 34 cm 49

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Porcelain Medals 2018 porcelain, hand-painted 280 pieces, size variable edition of 5 53

BÙI CÔNG KHÁNH Bùi Công Khánh (b. 1972, Danang, Vietnam) is an internationally exhibited artist from Vietnam whose diverse practice includes performance, painting, drawing, porcelain, woodcarving, installation and video. Touching upon his country’s transformation and how it affects society, he turns his practice into a personal journey traversing his own family history through a narrative that reaches an international audience. Bùi Công Khánh’s artworks are a layering of historical research and conceptual ideas that bring together the crafts of his homeland, spiritual traditions and the impediments of communist Vietnam into a contemporary art practice. Exhibitions include: Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-Wood Grenades – The American War in Vietnam examined through the art of Bùi Công Khánh curated by Iola Lenzi, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 2018, Seam Line at Wilfrid Israel Museum, 2017, Dislocate, San Art and The Factory, Ho Chi Minh City, 2016; Fortress Temple, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 2015; The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, Arter, Istanbul, 2014; Concept, Context, Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia, BACC, Bangkok (touring), 2013-2019; 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2009. His works are collected by the M+ Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Gallery of Modern Art/Queensland Art Gallery, Australia; Arter Vehbi Koç Collection, Istanbul, Turkey.

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BÙI CÔNG KHÁNH Born 1972, in Da Nang City. Currently lives and works in Hoi An, Vietnam

EDUCATION 1998

Bachelor of Fine Arts in oil painting, University of Fine Arts, Ho Chi Minh City

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018

2017 2016 2015 2014 2010 2005 2004

Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-Wood Grenades -The American War in Vietnam examined through the art of Bui Cong Khanh, Curated by Iola Lenzi, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

Seam Line, Wilfrid Israel Museum, Israel.

Dislocate, The Factory Contemporary Art Centre, Ho Chi Minh City.

Fortress Temple, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

For Home and Country, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore.

JUICE, Java Café ,Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

SAFE, L’USINE, Ho Chi Minh City.

Life is Consumption, SAN ART, Ho Chi Minh City.

The Souvenir, Mai’s Gallery.

I AND THE WHAT, Mai’s Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2019 Artist in residence and exhibition at Absolute Art Space, Tainan, Taiwan.

Concept Context Contestation-art and the collective in Southeast Asia (Yangon version), Goethe

Institut Yangon/BACC at The Secretariat, Yangon, Myanmar.

2017 International ceramic workshop and exhibition at Taoxichuan-Jindezhen International Ceramics,

Jiangxi, China.

UNDEFINED BOUNDARIES : between Vietnamese and Korean Contemporary Art at

Heritage Space, Hanoi, Vietnam.

2016 Singapore Biennale 2016: An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Art Museum.

Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia (Jogja version),

BACC/Cemeti House for Art, Jogjakarta, Indonesia.

Sein-Antlitz-Koerper Exhibition, Berlin, Germany.

Into Thin Air, Group exhibition, Manzi-Hanoi, Vietnam.

Shapeshifting: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

Bold Strokes: Celebration of Life and Art, Art Vietnam Gallery, Hanoi, Vietnam 2015 Reshaping Tradition: Contemporary Ceramics from East Asia, Pacific Asia Museum, USA.

Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Sountheast Asia, (Hanoi version), Goethe

Institut Hanoi/BACC, Hanoi, Vietnam BUILDING HISTORIES, Goethe Institut, Yangon, Myanmar.

2014 The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, ARTER/Koc Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey.

SENSORIUM 360° - Contemporary Art, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.

2013 Concept Context Contestation, Art and Collective in Southeast Asia, BACC-Bangkok, Thailand.

Creative Fusion-International Artist Residency Program, Cleveland, Ohio.

International Artist Lectures at Columbia College Chicago, USA. WE=ME Asean Art Exhibition and Symposium at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.

2012 South country-South of country,Taipei, Taiwan.

O exhibition at SAIC-School of the art institute of Chicago, USA. RiAP-International Performace Festival, Quebec, Canada.

IMAGES PASSAGES-Musees de l’agglomeration d’Anecy-France.

Four rising artists from Southeast Asia: Bui Cong Khanh, Nguyen Thai Tuan, Nguyen Trinh Thi,

Nov Cheanik at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

2010 Artist in Residence, Fondation la Roche Jacquelin, Maine-et-Loire, France.

Participated in “Making History “ Exhibition at Esplanade, Singapore.

2009 The Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6), Queenland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

INTERSECTION VietNam : New works from north & south, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore.

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2005

2004 2003

2002

2000 1999 1998 1997

INTERSECTION VietNam: New works from north & south, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur.

TIME LIGAMENTS contemporary Vietnamese artists, 10 Chancery Gallery, HongKong.

Who do you think we are…?, Bui Gallery, Hanoi, Vietnam.

Future, SanArt Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City.

Young Artists Exhibition at Ha Noi Fine Arts University.

Exhibition and Performance at Java café, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Asiatopia 2005, Bangkok, Thailand.

The Man Makes Rain, Video art, House World Culture–Berlin, Germany.

Taiwan International Performance Art Festival (Reaching Outlying-2005 TIPALive.)

Young Artists Exhibition at Sai Gon South Arts Center.

Exhibition painting in Seoul, Korea.

Sea Arts Festival, Busan Biennale, Korea International Art Performance, Kwang-Ju, Biennale, Korea International Art Performance “Congress-Welcome Gold”, Seoul, Korea.

Participated in “NIPAF Asian Performance Art Series”, Japan.

Young view competition. Centre de culturel francais de Hanoi. 2nd Prixe.

Performance at Blue Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City.

Installation and Performance at Binh Quoi village, Ho Chi Minh City.

Hoi An artist Club Exhibition The Color.

Seoul-Asia Art Now, Seoul, South Korea.

Hoi An’s People, La Gai Arts Space, Hoi An, Vietnam.

Windows to Asia arts network, Vietnam Workshop.

ASIATOPIA 2002, Bangkok, Thailand.

MELTING POT, Toulouse, France.

Vietnam Multifaceted, Toulouse, France.

Tiedeux du sud, Impressions Gallery, Paris, France.

Arts Exhibition for World Peace, GANA gallery, Seoul, Korea.

Group Exhibition by young artists at Blue Gallery in Da Nang city.

Group Exhibition by Young Artists as Vietnam Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City.

Installation Arts Exhibition “Who Am I?” with French and Vietnamese students.

AWARDS AND HONOURS 2011 15 finalists at the Asia-Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize 2011 competition,

Singapore Art Museum.

2005 3 months Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, USA. 2004 Young view competition. Centre de culturel francais de Hanoi. 2nd Prize.

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ALL WORKS OF ART COPYRIGHT © BUI CONG KHANH ESSAY COPYRIGHT © IOLA LENZI 10 CHANCERY LANE GALLERY Designed by RACHEL MAN TUNG CHING This catalogue is published on the occasion of PORCELAIN MEDALS AND JACKFRUIT-WOOD GRENADES - THE AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM EXAMINED THROUGH THE ART OF BUI CONG KHANH, CURATED BY IOLA LENZI at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong from November 8, 2018 to Januarary 19, 2019.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in Hong Kong, 2019