Starting from burning and destroying unsatisfactory wood carvings more than 10 years ago, artist Ngo Van Sac came up with the idea of combining fire and wood to create a new work of art for himself. The traces of fire on the wood surface, on the one hand, destroy part of the material it affects, on the other hand, clearly reveal the image of natural wood grain, bringing great inspiration to the artist during the creative process.
The artist has recreated a part of Vietnamese culture over the years: portraits of Hanoi women in the 19th and early 20th centuries wearing scarves, portraits of women in the mountains, and royal costumes, and more recently, portraits of people in the present. The names of the paintings "Memory Land", "Faded", "Echo", "Last Imprint", "Dream", "Clouds", "Return" along with "Waves", "Rain", "Mist"... seem to hold on to something, and wash away something else. The neatness, solemnity, and antiquity both contrast and suggest the changes of modern times.
Wood grain is like clouds, like water waves, but can also be like rain flowing on the face, through the human body. The mark of nature, of time erases part of the memory, but has the ability to remind the memory. The potential, the hidden, the mysterious, the coiled in the portraits evoke the spiritual thread of the East throughout. Something that is evident but elusive, certain but vague.
Ngo Van Sac’s portraits with open eyes defying time, and closed eyes immersed in space, the artist probably looked with both states at the past and the present. Ngo Van Sac said that the metaphor in his paintings speaks of balance, between tradition and modernity, between nature and man. The artist works on wood but does not limit himself to modern ways of expression.
In addition to burning wood with a blowtorch, the artist also uses screen printing, transfer printing, painting on wood and chiseling away wood. The lost details combined with the added layers of color, the clarified details and the blurred details seem to not overwhelm the other, nor negate the other. The portraits on the paintings have the appearance of statues, and conversely, the statues give viewers the image of portraits with many slices. The wooden bars and gaps always stand still by themselves despite the many carved images of temples, newspapers, stamps, etc. printed on them.
Ngo Van Sac’s works give viewers a sense of stillness, despite the change in exhibition space between rooms and two floors. The disturbance comes gradually, softly and lightly, like the spread of waves when we throw a pebble into a lake, but the image of that pebble never leaves our mind. Like when the fire is out, the image of the starting flame remains forever in our mind.
The viewer is not sure when the artist puts down the blowtorch, with the colors he covers the painting, what image will appear in the artist's mind at the end. It could be a fire, a roof, a tree, a wave, a lake, or a face. Or it could be a mist that covers everything - and the artist's recent works are no exception - to take him to other distant memory regions.
Painter Ngo Van Sac was born in 1980 in Hoai Duc, Hanoi. Graduated from Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2004. Master of Fine Arts in 2008. Exhibition "Distant East" from January 10 - 20, 2025 at Thang Long Art Gallery, 41 Hang Gai, Hoan Kiem, Hanoi.
