VietNamNet Bridge - ‘YIN’ exhibition by Nguyen Khanh Toan will be held at Cuci Fine Art, 22A Hai Ba Trung, Hoan Kiem, Hanoi from 13 November to 14 December.

Filling with disbelief in the spiritual world, Nguyen Khanh Toan expresses the world after death through his artworks. This is the world of obsession, oppression and vulnerability, filled with sentimental ghosts.

He will present the works from past to present in this solo exhibition. The gallery walls will be drawn with collages of figures from the paintings to create a separate space. Many of the human images are distorted, broken with clinging primordial bodies, animals, nature and temples, and shrines combined with the imaginations of human characters, and objects in hell.

Toan used worship and spiritual materials known as votives in the Vietnamese belief. At first he was quite afraid to use these materials as these are considered sensitive religious artifacts as well as long-standing traditions of Vietnamese ancestors from the past to the present. However, day by day, he was fascinated and curious with these materials when he mixed colors, and paper layered together to create the effect as he desired to express a haunting and claustrophobic feeling that showed the scars in each individual person, especially himself.

The red color in his paintings is haunting and intense. It is a mix of fire and blood. The deformed shape of animal and human looked like chaos of the circus and petitioner spirits in hell, but it was more likely people’s life on earth, human madness agitated and confusing.

Human or demon - it is difficult to distinguish in his paintings. There are red colors with a little romance like 'rose for you' which is like Manga comic styles about young girls, beautiful and innocent. However, it is little different because the beautiful girl is in white mourning with her red tongue sticking out, their eyes red and covered in part by roses with dead red colors, and the dead farewell flowers to the afterlife.

Pink is used to symbolize a lie, deception and mundaneness of human beings and life. Black makes everything sink in slowly as if to take the minutes of narrative, retreats and perception more seriously, about life, death, faith or ego.

He said “the spiritual world, which anybody can believe, it will be haunted” and when you believe, there is nowhere to discern what is real or fake.

Green is used to describe the little spirits, which are lost on earth. These spirits exist flickering and blinking as a petite planet, lonely, cold, and tiny on the hospital's banyan trees of Children's Hospital and the Birth Hospital. But, they gather together, lean and appease each other, or at  another glance, with less grief, they soar gently and deposit like dew.

In Toan’s paintings there are monsters born from the poison of war, grime. It expresses haunting and hurt beyond imagination.

Born in 1974 in Quang Ninh, Toan studied at The Hanoi College of Art, and The Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema. He has exhibited in group exhibitions and solo exhibitions in The Cultural House, Studio 25 and The Royal Danish Embassy in Hanoi.

Some works by Toan:

T. Van