Difficult when one evokes the techniques of painting by the medium of the lacquers not to think naturally, at first, to their distant eastern roots which date from more than 5000 years. Lacquer refers us to a traditional and emblematic cultural heritage. An inheritance rich of lessons, certainly legitimate, which does not justify for all that one persists in confining the lacquer to the Asian continent and assimilating it too exclusively to ancestral times and to the pastistic ways.
Phi Phi Oanh’s work is inspired by her research on lacquer as a material combined with her studies of the Vietnamese lacquer tradition (sơn mà). Drawing on the hybrid nature of her personal story, Oanh constructs pictorial and evocative installations. The argument is not intended to obscure the specific know-how of painting by the medium of lacquers. She tends rather not to reduce his creations to a limiting and too technical discourse to the detriment of art. This is an essential point to apprehend the paintings of Phi Phi Oanh and especially to fully grasp their contemporary significance in the history of art, because that’s what it is. Over the years, Phi Phi Oanh has managed to develop a very elaborate combinatorial technical palette. She has been able to extend and distance herself from a traditional skill by innovative and secret methods, of which she is the instigator and the only ambassador. In PRO SE installation, paintings reference the touchscreen tablet becoming the way we interact and mediate the world and represent a window into our collective imagination. This series is inspired by photo streams found on all sides of the world and includes images of the photos, images, and pictures of the world.
She uses lacquer as a means of expression in the service of art, a medium among others. Let’s put aside the extraordinary aesthetics of Phi Phi Oanh’s works, the unforgettable multi-sensory experience one experiences while contemplating them. Lacquer is above all a medium of protean artistic expression whose scope and expansive possibilities are extremely rich, if not inexhaustible. It is in this sense a new language reappropriated, a desacralized contemporary medium that only needs to be developed and further exploited, enriched creatively in multiple and infinite directions, whatever the hybridizations of forms, stylistics.
Sotto in Sù, or “from below, upward”, she uses use Vietnamese lacquer painting in the format of a ceiling mural to create the illusion of deep space. She takes a static satellite imagery of the corner of the planet to create a Mapa Mundi with a local medium. The ceiling fresco is to be viewed “from below looking upwards”, similar to how we look up at the night sky to see cosmos. Her painting opens up to a view of the world in Twentieth century.
Miche Crépeau, french politician , said “True progress is a tradition that continues.”
Article by Severine Grosjean
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
