Venue: S.E.A Focus – A spotlight on Southeast Asia
Gilman Baracks, Singapore
Dates: 15 – 19 January 2020
CUC Gallery, Hanoi, Vietnam is thrilled to present The Hybrid by Vietnamese artist Tulip Duong (b. 1959, Vietnam). The Hybrid is an installation of sculptures made out of natural serpentine stones and gearboxes.
Akin to an organism, each sculpture consists of two parts: the lower part is a used gearbox that was repainted in red color; the upper part is a natural serpentine stone originated from the Northern highland area of Vietnam (Ha Giang and Yen Bai). The gearbox is the transmission, an intermediary to increase or decrease the speed of an engine. All of the gearboxes were used and discarded during the most exciting time for the smokestack industry of Vietnam. Each natural serpentine stone is carved out in a way to keep its most organic form, a gift from Mother Earth millions of years ago.
Tulip combines these two unique opposite singulars carrying their own histories and strengths. While gearboxes are only a few decade years old and created by human hands, serpentine stones – the creation of nature have existed for millions of years old. Though these two objects can never seem to go together nor have any kind of relationship, Tulip makes it possible to turn this combination into a hybrid. A new species represents human characteristics: born out of nature but need to transform and change to fit in with social developments and life. Notably, the artist puts nature (serpentine stone) on top of the product by human (gearbox) to stress the important and respectable role of nature over us. The red color of the gearboxes also alerts and warns the viewers about the consequences human would face if we fail to protect the environment and eco-system.
Tulip Duong (b.1959) was born and raised in a very traditional and typical family of Vietnam. She saw the remnants of the war inflicting on Vietnam, went through the Đổi mới period (1986) - the economic reform policy leading to Vietnam’s ‘socialist-led market economy), and witnessed the shifts of her own country under globalization. Grew up close to nature in a countryside in the Northern Vietnam, Tulip has always taken interests in topics of nature and ecology system. Tulip Duong’s career has the unusual combination of a mathematician, educator, marketing analyst and eventually an artist. She is highly methodical in her creative approach and process. The artist first looks at a large pool of materials, resources, themes, and methodologies, before selecting a key theme for a new series, and working through many artworks to reinforce the theme from various angles. Tulip Duong’s art practice was given a strong boost when the Museum of Ethnography in Hanoi organized her first solo exhibition in 2005 and her second solo exhibition in 2013 at the Vietnamese Women’s Museum, Hanoi. The artist’s passion for art in its sheer creativity and openness, was consolidated through a visit of museums and collections in Europe in 2013, when she experienced not only many works she knew heretofore from reproductions, but also site-specific works, the context of the museums and collections, from the architecture to the museum photographs of Thomas Struth. Tulip Duong proclaimed, “there is no limit for everything in art!”.
