Plum Blossoms
555 West 25th Street, 212-719-7008
Chelsea
January 21 - February 19, 2005
Reception: Friday, January 21, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Tran Trong Vu, who left Vietnam in 1989 on scholarship to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France, transforms the gallery space with his labyrinthine full-room installation of paintings on clear plastic suspended from the ceiling in eternal, placeless limbo. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a group of ambiguously smiling figures caught halfway between watery, alkaline formlessness and photographic still. Clothed in uniform white shirts and black ties, rendered in monotone colors, comically shuffling in the air where they hang, this army of post-colonial ‘everymen’ represents the new Asia of corporate conformity and street-hustle, while the transparency of the plastic material upon which they are painted engages the audience, implicating viewers in a psychological game of blurred vision and misidentification.