An Exhibition by Yến Năng, Phạm Thị Hồng Sâm, Hà Huy Mười, Lê Đức Hùng and Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng

Opening: 17:00, Monday, 26.8.2019
Venue: VICAS ART STUDIO, 32 Hao Nam, Hanoi
Time: 26.8 – 11.9.2019
Free entry
Media partner: Hanoi Grapevine

The name of this group exhibition was easily agreed by the five artists, because in the past all of them had painted and made statues of some kinds of insect. In fact, INSECT is just a topic, the purpose of those artists is to present new concepts, ideas and new methods in sculpture. It seems that all five artists want to escape the traditional concept of sculpture in creating 3D shapes, carving, chiseling or reflecting reality ...

Yen Nang is a visual artist who specializes in making fleeting works, who recently has made sculptures of iron fiber. This time he combined iron fiber and coal. The terrible forest fire in Ha Tinh left him deeply heartbroken, so he went to the burned forest and picked up charcoal rods from the ashes to make his work. In forest fire, even little insects got burned to coal. After fire, there was no life left in the catastrophic death.

Hung Dingo is a satirical artist, so his view of insects also reveals social views and concerns about pests infesting human spirit. His sculptural language is spontaneous and free, which is made up of bending and interleaving iron and barbed wire…

Under the eyes of artist Ha Huy Muoi, sometimes a little insect is tiny but has even more destructive power than a rhino. His method is exaggerating and making his insects both familiar and strange. Pham Thi Hong Sam will bring to the exhibition a spectacular 2D sculpture. That is Sam's new contribution to sculpture language in Vietnam. She also created the weird, imagine but beautiful insects.

For more than a year, Nguyen Manh Hung has studied the behavior of ants and has noticed the social characteristics of this species. In this exhibition, he arranges his ant colonies with both queens and worker ants to express the social relations of ants as complex as the society of ours. His technique and method of iron welding is very sophisticated that no one has done before.

All five artists do not consider commercial purpose as the top target in this exhibition. They all see this exhibition as an idea game. Because of this conception, the choice of expression mediums or materials of these artists is very free, non-traditional and cheap, including iron fiber, scrap iron, paperboard, foam, coal... I think this is the beauty of this exhibition, because if the material is cheap you can free yourself in expressing your ideas without fear of going bankrupt if your work is not sold. Therefore, the public has the opportunity to access the daring and bizarre artworks that cannot be found anywhere else.

Dr. Bui Quang Thang
Art Director, Vicas Art Studio.