"Dream" is the first solo exhibition of artist To Ngoc Trang, also known as Trang Troc, displaying 26 ceramic portraits on lacquer background. Most of the portraits are famous faces in many fields, from religion, politics, science, art to literary icons.
In it, artist To Ngoc Trang also painted himself with broken pieces of pottery from his wife's bowl. This is the first work in the "Dream" series, which also opened a new period of his writing.
Artist To Ngoc Trang shared, "At the end of 2021, my wife broke a very beautiful bowl and asked me to put it back together. Looking at the broken pieces, I found them strangely similar to myself. I tried to put them together to make my face. And in the end, everyone who came to see recognized that it was Trang Troc.
I realized that broken ceramic pieces are durable. They are also multi-faceted, from shape, block, to color. While traditional painting has been using long-standing materials such as watercolor, oil, lacquer, acrylic to express, why don't we use various broken ceramic pieces to combine together, evoking shape, block and color to create a feeling?
The material that artist To Ngoc Trang uses in her work is broken ceramics. That is, ceramics in the "trash" form, a material derived from a product that was once complete before being broken.
Different from the art of mosaic or decorative ceramics in Nguyen Dynasty tomb architecture and in modern urban architecture, To Ngoc Trang's creative language is to use natural broken ceramic pieces, completely without using any machines or mechanical devices to shape the broken pieces according to subjective will.
Commenting on the works, critic Phan Cam Thuong assessed: "During the Nguyen Dynasty in Vietnam, this art was also used for many unique architectural decorative works, and people also smashed many precious ceramic bowls and plates to make paintings and mosaics, typically the ceramic mosaic work at Khai Dinh Tomb. Ceramic sculptures related to paintings and statues were also created by many artists from the University of Industrial Fine Arts."
Painter To Ngoc Trang also graduated from here, but his way of working is unique, and not related to any traditional technical order.
He contemplated on human beings, their experiences, their breakdowns, even their shattering, that in their youth when they were born, everyone was like a precious, intact vase. But then everyone had to recreate themselves, from the broken pieces of their lives, and together they would have the beauty of an adult.
The exhibition "Dream" will last from now until January 19 at Area 75 - Art & Auction 75 Hang Bo, Hanoi.
