Nguyen Manh Hung

Putting "Painting" to Death (Note 1): Image and Text / Chen Chi-Hsiang. Venue: Mac/Val, French Contemporary Art Museum. Dates: June 14 to September 21. The dead end of modernist avant-garde art is the abandonment of painting. Artists strain their minds, subverting everything and repeatedly murdering painting. The death of painting often haunts the art world; who buried it? Putting painting to death does not kill painting, but exhausts the artists. Vietnamese young artist Nguyen Manh Hung (born 1976), in his solo exhibition Lang Du Adventures, attempts one more murder of "bad painting." Dramatically using a 3D sculptural installation, he presents a group of fully armed soldiers cruelly putting painting to death, humorously metaphorizing the predicament and hidden worries of modernism. Viewed from a local perspective on the Vietnam War, how did the US military lose despite such modernized precision weapons? Thus, painting has not ended because it was declared dead by modernist avant-garde pioneers. Note 1: This title is my own interpretation derived from the works.