Tang Contemporary Art is thrilled to present Devouring, a distinctive exhibition of two powerful emerging Asian artists: female artist Kizzo from Seoul (South Korea) and male artist Nguyen Duc Loi from Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) who are both creating stunning surreal and phantasmagoric paintings featuring memories, experiences, traumas, fantasies, and inter-relations that exist commonly in social structures and family units.

 

The highlight of Devouring exhibition focuses on the presentation of exceptional series of paintings created by each artist. The exhibition aims to generate and illuminate a rich, forceful and critical visual dialogue between the two artists who come from different family and cultural backgrounds, both in Asia. Each artist develops a very peculiar visual language, creating unparalleled artworks for raising vital, subtle and critical questions related to their up-bringing values and nurturing life as an individual autonomous subject and as a social body.

 

Kizzo rises as a unique Asian female artist on the international art scene with her style of creation. Tang Contemporary Art is very honored to represent the artist and premiere her artworks to the public. Her mesmerizing series of 8 paintings are grouped under the series titled Blood Ties. Each painting from the Blood Ties series features a situation, an experience, an unburied memory related to her times during childhood, constantly in traumatizing family contexts. Trapped in the middle of devouring parental figures that are disfigured by their own insanity, violence and compulsive destruction, Kizzo expresses in her paintings such acts of oppression and constriction, but also vigorous images of resistance, dissociation, hope and liberation as a female and an artist. The canvas is turned into a vast battlefield where ever changing flows of shapes, colors, figures and energies are engaged into fantasized organic ensemble and surrealistic situations. These deliquescent disfigured figures are caught in voracious acts of eating each other, melting together or extruding from each other’s body. Their flesh and skin are often covered by astonishing layers of colored circles that look like whirlpool cavities or protrusions of scars, hollowed eyes, deep wounds or a skin rash.

 

Nguyen Duc Loi, contemporary male artist from Vietnam, delves into the theme of humanity and social structures in his thought-provoking paintings. Questioning our relations to power, greed, consumption and corruption, he is using a large palette of colors and shapes to create stunning scenes where humans, demons, deities, angels... are melting together or conflicting in opposite directions. Drawing inspiration from South East Asian and classical European cultures and art histories, but also from daily social life in Vietnam, Nguyen Duc Loi is depicting powerful aspects of individual and collective lives as well as collective solidarity and support for free will. One of Nguyen Duc Loi’s notable achievements includes having his paintings in Vietnamese, European, American public and private collections, a testament to the impact and resonance of his artistic vision. Through his bold exploration of critical art and societal challenges, Nguyen Duc Loi invites viewers to contemplate the intersection of power, ideology, and human nature.

 

Devouring, far from illustrating stereotypes of childhood, is a critical exhibition that aims to observe and question how contemporary societies of control and economic crisis contexts are going along with the flourishing of the infantilization of art and culture. People are now seeking refuge in regressive and avid consumption of childish imageries made by and for adults, objectification of women’s bodies, and even sub sexual iconographies.

 

In global art history, very few major artists have taken the risk to face private and social traumas without any compromise: Franciso Goya, Salvador Dali, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, Cindy Sherman might be the most brilliant representatives of a daring art that is able to point out and challenge simultaneously individual and social dysfunctions.

 

Kizzo and Nguyen Duc Loi stand as two exceptional major emerging Asian artists extending such visionary expressions of personal experiences combined with critical questions addressed to social diseases.

 

If the two artists represent acts of devouring, swallowing and throwing-up, the intent is to raise collective awareness of how is it precious to nurture human inter-relations based on autonomous life while caring of each other in collective and social bonds.

 

The two artists, with their own style and art practice, are creating evolving shapes and energizing colors in constant process of mutation: accumulation, coagulation, congregation, restriction are often contradicted by opposite shapes, colors and energies of extension, liquefaction, expansion, as an attempt to escape and free oneself from traumas and histories.

 

Needless to say, artists like Kizzo and Nguyen Duc Loi not only paint out their personal life stories but they are also truly using art as a practice of life to overcome oppression in favor of openness, to construct hope and liberation for the future.

 

DEVOURING…. images, histories, words, propaganda, time, flesh, one-self, society, family, trauma, passion, life, world...