Nha Mat Pho/House Facing The Streets
Hanoi’s economic boom is reshaping this ancient city’s urban landscape. Where is the line between evolution and loss, progress and amnesia? Nguyen The Son’s series, Nha Mat Pho does not provide us with answers. Instead it does so much more, inviting viewers to see today’s Hanoi not as discontinuous with the past but as both creating and being created by its quest for the future.
Nha Mat Pho/House Facing The Streets
Hanoi’s economic boom is reshaping this ancient city’s urban landscape. Where is the line between evolution and loss, progress and amnesia? Nguyen The Son’s series, Nha Mat Pho does not provide us with answers. Instead it does so much more, inviting viewers to see today’s Hanoi not as discontinuous with the past but as both creating and being created by its quest for the future.
With all of the poetic precision we have come to expect from Nguyen The Son, Nha Mat Pho investigates the evolution of advertising and city space in Hanoi. Nguyen Thai Hoc Street, the former street of billboards and signs, is presented here in a series of sculptural photographs. By photographing the small houses on Nguyen Thai Hoc Street that have been covered with modern glossy billboards, Son shows viewers the evolution of advertising, not only as a technology, but also as a cipher through which inhabitants come to experience themselves and the city.
The precious street frontage of the quintessentially narrow Vietnamese house is a symbol of power and prosperity. Nha Mat Pho asks us to examine what power and prosperity look like today in Hanoi? Obama flashes a perfect white smile, a young woman stand hips cocked ever-ready, an iphone screen catches a quick flash of light. The artist photographs these billboards, and then translates his images into multi-layered sculpture, making a miniature, three-dimensional mock-up of the constructed urban space. In reconstructing Nguyen Thai Hoc Street Son sought out a few technicians working there to help him print and build these ephemeral images. By using the men Nguyen Thai Hoc has traditionally employed, Son was able to embed into his Nha Mat Pho series the city’s historic progeny, the centuries of craftsmanship that have created modern Hanoi.
In the exhibition hall viewers are encouraged to engage in
the process, to have their photographs taken alongside or in front of the 3-D
digital sculptures. Nha Mat Pho
allows viewers to see themselves within both the artwork and the evolution of Hanoi’s identity. Son
invites viewers to finish the work with their presence.
Ever attuned to the poetics of change and the interplay of
progress and purchasing power, Nguyen The Son poses a few well-wrought
questions: Who controls the energy behind Vietnam’s societal transformation?
What is lost or effaced on the superhighway to development? Who are we
becoming, how do we participate, and where are we going now? This exacting and
evocative, genre-bending series of photographic sculptures is nothing short of
revolutionary. Nha Mat Pho examines a post-modern concept, a phenomenon, in which
the content of the art is not really finished. The artist only starts the
process, creating a visual game in which the public can partake.
Nguyen the Son, in his incessant questioning does not disappoint, he pushes our intellect and our curiosity to go beyond the traditional, the preconceived idea. I congratulate Son on yet another brilliant exhibition for the thinking man.
Suzanne Lecht
Art Vietnam Gallery
Hanoi Vietnam
