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Danish architect’s ongoing exhibit features VN’s floating houses

Tuoitrenews

Updated : 03/08/2014 16:29 GMT + 7

An exhibit by famed Danish architect Hans Peter Hagens, which highlights Vietnamese floating houses, is running in Ho Chi Minh City until Monday and is set to run in Hanoi from Mar 25 to 30 . Hagens hopes to adopt the techniques in building similar houses in Denmark.

The exhibit, going on until Mar 10 at HCMC Architecture University, 196 Pasteur, district 3, showcases Hagens’ photos and water-color sketches of the floating houses and locals’ daily life in rural Vietnam, mostly the Mekong Delta and northern Quang Ninh and Ninh Binh provinces.

Locals in these areas, which are typically prone to floods, choose to build and stay in such houses.

The Danish architect spent almost two months last year along with his wife- anthropologist Louise Sylvest Vestergaard - and their two kids in the areas to keep constant observations and interview locals who live in the floating houses.

With his painstaking research, Hagens hopes to adopt the unique building techniques with such houses in Denmark.

“Vietnam’s time-honored, innovative techniques with floating structures can provide groundbreaking ideas in Danish and Western architecture in general,” he noted.

The exhibit also features large posters which tell Hagens’ and his wife’s research and interviews in English, along with photos of canals in southern Denmark. He noted that though the towns along the canals aren’t identical to those in Vietnam, they can adopt similar floating structures.

“What I really appreciate about the plain-looking floating houses in rural Vietnam is that they give locals opportunities to live among nature and cherish all it has to offer, which Westerners have always yearned for. Besides, as the urban land resource is shrinking fast, building floating houses can be a great solution to expand living space.”

“Architecture isn’t merely about designing and building, it’s closely related to several social sciences, such as anthropology and sociology,” the architect stressed.

After closing in HCMC, the exhibit will continue to run at Manzi Art Space, 14 Phan Huy Ich, Hanoi from Mar 25 to 30, before being taken to Holeby town, Lolland-Falsters in Denmark and its capital Copenhagen from Apr 3 to 30.

The exhibit was earlier launched at the Denmark Embassy in Hanoi.

Ngo Van Sac burns wood into paintings (VietNamNet.vn)

VietNamNet Bridge - "In the Midst of Life" is a solo exhibition of wood burn paintings by Hanoi-based artist Ngo Van Sac, which will open at Craig Thomas Gallery, 27i Tran Nhat Duat Street in District 1, HCM City from October 25 to November 25.

It will feature the artist’s passion in blocks of fresh, untreated wood that grip his images with rawness and the curved veins in the wood’s surface take the eyes gently up and down the portraits, sneaking into the intricacies of the pictures.

Sac’s production process must involve a lot of planning, but the artworks are never overdone. Minimal color and simple materials prevent visual saturation and then he pencils the outlines onto the wooden blocks, then blowtorches them, masking off areas with a metal spatula to modulate the color. The burnt images are surprisingly detailed, and fire alone cannot offer such sharpness.

Sac has always painted people. In previous exhibitions, he has shown historical characters with older, wiser faces, or sometimes groups of sitters. This time, he turns inwards with his self-portraits which may be construed as self-indulgent, an honest search, and an expression of personal emotion.

Sac grew up in a village 20 kilometers from Hanoi and those peaceful memories will be recalled in bicycles, trees and water lilies which fade their way into the images, like déjà-vu of a tranquil lifestyle that is almost mythical for the urban youth.

The two installation pieces of the collection create the sensation of a flow around the wooden shapes. Each prism presents different moods of the artist, under the perspectives of several individuals. The narrative unfolds as the viewer walks around, showing little action. It’s a story of the subtle changes in emotion that come and go all the time.

"My art work is about desires, the tension between real life and fantasies and the complicated relationships among humans. I want to show my emotions and share my own stories. I am interested in artworks that are created from different materials, such as wood cut combined with newspaper, sand or acrylic. I like strong renderings of figure, the effect of different surface textures and strong contrast between black and white. The inspiration for my work comes from my daily life," Sac said.

"Concrete figurative details and simple empty spaces refer to both real and unreal life as well as to dreams about myself. Each circumstance creates complex emotion- whether people are alone or sitting together, talking – and this is something I want to show and share. Today, we communicate with email, cell phones and other communication technologies. The distance between humans is growing. We need to spend more time talking directly to one another and share our emotions."

Sac's Biography

1982 - Born in Hanoi, Vietnam

1999 - Graduated from Hanoi Institute of Fine Art

1999 - Won prize of Vietnamese Association at National Student Exhibition

2000 - Exhibited in National exhibition, Hanoi Vietnam

2001 - Exhibited in Asean Philip Morris exhibition at National Fine Art Museum, Hanoi Vietnam

2002 - Workshop in Goethe Institute, Hanoi, Vietnam

2003 - Exhibited in Asean Philip Morris Exhibition

2004 - Exhibited in Capital Exhibition, Hanoi Vietnam. Second prize at National Fine Art University Student Exhibition

2004 - Graduate with a Masters from Vietnam Fine Art University

2005 - Exhibited in National Exhibition Hanoi, Vietnam

2007 - Exhibited in 1st Malaysia International Art Expo