Opening: 10.11.2011 @6pm
Exhibition on view until 15.12.2011
Location: Sàn Art
3 Me Linh Street
Binh Thanh District
Ho Chi Minh City

Regrettably, the Cultural Ministry of Ho Chi Minh City, has asked San Art to remove the previous explanatory text that was here on Nguyen Thai Tuan’s exhibition from San Art’s website.

In Dalat, in the highlands north of Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen Thai Tuan’s art studio is full of natural light and the wall above his desk is covered with books and color print outs of famous contemporary painters from across the world.

For Nguyen Thai Tuan it is important to be working at his art and thus he is in the studio everyday, reading and painting. He is one of the most prolific local Vietnamese contemporary artists today and with a growing reputation of inclusion in international exhibition and increasingly collected by prominent public international art collections.

Nguyen Thai Tuan is known for his painting of body-less figures. In ‘Fullness of Absence’, the artist has taken this signature trait into new directions.

In this exhibition, fully clothed men and women with no bodies sit within seeming anonymous spaces akin to a hotel room, where the direction of light creates particular shadows on the floor and walls. There is also a series of paintings where hats, coats and shoes are sentimentally painted, like a kind of memory that has been carefully nurtured. In these images, the surface of life and its material objects are beautifully painted however, despite existing with all these material necessities of contemporary global life, these figures appear listless, bored, lost and not knowing who they are. Nguyen Thai Tuan looks at the increasing wealth around him and wonders to whom does it benefit and how is it procured?