Tuan Vu: Annam at the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

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Two women sit on the edge of a pond dotted with lily pads, playing the sitar. Behind them floats an ethereal figure, bathed in golden light – perhaps the guardian of the garden in which they sit, or a manifestation of the music itself? Annam, a solo exhibition by the Vietnamese artist Tuan Vu, casts us into ornate scenes, lush with colour, plant life and rich fabrics. They are part paradisal visions, part homage to the culture that the artist left behind when he immigrated to Quebec.

The show’s title refers to the name used for Vietnam during the Chinese and French colonial periods. Loaded with a complex and painful history. Despite this, for the artist, it also carries ‘a sense of memory and distance’. This speaks to the complicated act of remembering itself.

Tranquil South

The painting Tranquil South is titled after the translation of Annam, though the literal translation is ‘pacified south’, and depicts a woman sitting on the river bank, shading herself from the sun with a decorative umbrella. The title, half ironic, points to Vu’s awareness of his own inability to relate to the struggles of that period, but it also refers to his continual search for harmony and beauty through the making of art.

While the landscapes and figures in his work are inspired by his home country, the emotive, non-naturalistic use of colour is influenced by the Parisian artist group Les Nabis. Here, as in other works, the warm tones of yellow and pink, along with touches of luminescence, transport us into a magical realm that exists outside of reality. 

A Usual Day 

A Usual Day playfully points to this disconnect, reminding us that we are entering into an imaginary space where, in fact, nothing is usual or ordinary. In this scene, we are positioned within an internal space, glimpsing behind a draped curtain into a garden beyond where a woman is watering a pot of flowers. 

The composition here has been carefully constructed to gradually draw our eye through the space. It mimics the sense of walking in wonder, past the painted vases and the black panther—a symbol of freedom for Vu. We move into the garden and up to the sky. Here, we notice the faint trace of a domed glass roof and begin to imagine the heat and fragrant scents around us.

A Trembling Sky

Marking a shift from Vu’s typical focus on landscape, there are also a number of portraits in this exhibition where the surreal backdrops point to layered narratives and a sense of unfolding time. The Official Portrait, for instance, depicts a queen seated in elaborate áo dài, the national dress of Vietnam. Behind her, we see various apparitions. These include the figure of a western queen holding a sceptre, the Buddha, and the odalisque. The odalisque is a direct reference to the Vietnamese painter Mai Trung Thu, who in turn was inspired by Ingres. 

This interweaving of references reflects the complex cultural inheritances that shape Vu’s work, where Vietnamese and European artistic traditions coexist within the same pictorial space. Vu does not try to resolve these histories. Instead, he allows them to overlap and drift through his compositions like memories. This approach suggests that identity, like the landscapes he paints, is something continually reimagined from afar. In this way, the exhibition becomes less a reconstruction of a time or place than a meditation on the fragile, imaginative process of remembering it.

ANNAM – Tuan Vu

2 – 30 May

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