Hoa Dung is born in France, lives and works in UK.
Hoa Dung holds a BA Hons in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School and a MSc from Ecole Centrale de Lyon (major Applied Mathematics).
In 2019, she created [La Galerie Libre] an agent with multiple identities: artist or collective of artists, curator and physical gallery in movement.
Whether painting, craft, installation or performance, each work reflects a different temporal experience. Since the pandemic crisis, my research focuses around the question of time, that of my practice and that of my works. The modalities of my artistic activity draw an alternative where the need for inaction and the delay as a mean to be out-of-time remain primary. The result is a way of doing between comtemplative idleness and frantic labor.
Unlike some artists from the Vietnamese diaspora, I was born in the suburb of Paris, my work is more informed by my education in France. However, there is a transformation of the objects of my French-Vietnamese cultural heritage into disappearing objects. I most often choose domestic objects that I transform by economy of means. Through these mundane objects, I continue to explore the hybrid environment where traditions coexist in the homes of diaspora families. My works refer to the history of art and borrows from the Minimal (masculine) aesthetic. As a woman artist, I think that not to overdo it is a necessary indulgence.
The souvenir of the carbon paper is linked to one of the smell of ethyl alcohol used by the alcohol rotary duplicator, the ancestor of the photocopier. This smell used to spread throughout the classroom and intoxicate the schoolchildren until they were dizzy. The texts of these copies were affected by time, the ink fading quite quickly.
After sticking the carbon paper on the wall, the artwork appears when I start erasing it. The paper is torn off in a random fashion, but there are still pieces stuck on the wall highlighting negative shapes, namely the trace of what is no longer. The painting turns out to be the capture of a transitory state where the forms, between appearance and disappearance, coexist with each other without freezing, caught in a persistent ambiguity. The trace summons time. It gives the impression of being there only momentarily.
The comma is a moment of suspension of time in the discourse. The sound-absorbing acoustic foam has been dipped in a blend of vinyl acetate and Ultramarine pigments. Unlike the female bodies commodified as brushes in Yves Klein's Anthropometries, the acoustic foam drops freely and refuses any assignment. The comma introduces a delay in the speech like Art allows to experience being out-of-time. Walter Benjamin described in the Berlin Chronicles (1932) this necessary lag as the "half step behind" which allows him to find boredom and distance from the commodity.
My installation Vietnamese songs is the result of a collaborative work with my sister who lives in France. We collected the folk poems that our parents used to recite to us before falling asleep. The Vietnamese alphabet is a Latin alphabet, the intonation is given by 5 different accents. I wrote these poems and erased the letters leaving only the accents and therefore keeping only the distant music. The accents have been hand embroidered on pillowcases. Embroidery is a tradition inherited from the women of my family and more broadly a tradition of Vietnamese craftsmanship.
The broom is an object both liberating and alienating. Its material sensuality resists modernity and maintains the memory which is passed down through generations. I disassembled what has been done to get closer to the laborious gestures of craftsmen in the workshops and those of women at home. This contrary act is a tribute to this everyday object to go beyond its function and go back to its origins and context.
The pandemic crisis has changed my approach of artistic production. The struggle to find a studio, to move between precarious places, to transport my works has helped to lighten the used material. Monument for D. Flavin is a tribute to fragile utopias: building a monument with the lightness of paper and fragmenting the music of utopian discourses.
