VietNamNet Bridge – Galerie Quynh is probably not the most prepossessing of buildings. Situated outside the fish market on De Tham Street, with no sign advertising its existence, you could walk past Galerie Quynh everyday and never guess at what is inside.

What is inside right now is the exhibition, Tales of Chewing Gum, Noodle Soup and other Stories, a joint exhibition by artists Nguyen Trung and Hoang Duong Cam. It’s an interesting proposition, both sets of paintings offering stylistically different takes on broadly similar themes. Historical and social narratives are central to the exhibition, along with the transformative power of time.

Hoang Duong Cam explains how the concept for his contribution to the exhibition came about after the chance discovery of a series of 1972 photographs of Northern Vietnam in a friend’s Berlin library. “1972 was an important year. It was the year that my parents married, as well as the period of some of the heaviest American bombing of the war. It was also the year of the talks in Paris and a turning point in the war.”

Cam subsequently researched and revisited the sites of the 1972 photographs, taking pictures of his own with a pin hole lens from roughly the same standpoint as the earlier images. The pin hole leaves the resulting image dark and a little murky, a factor which Cam then exacerbated using computer technology. Onto this background, Cam painted brighter gauche patterns and shapes, giving the pictures a texture that goes beyond their photographic base. By their nature, the resulting picture is about the contrast between photography and art. However, Cam also explains it’s as much about time and the act of viewing as it is the choice of medium. “It’s about two time periods. The one is taking the picture and the other is looking at the first.” That’s as much about the viewer looking back to the pivotal year of 1972 as it is Cam viewing his own photograph.

War, and the memories of war, is a theme echoed in Nguyen Trung’s contribution to the exhibition. Nguyen Trung is one of Vietnam’s most accomplished abstract painters and the rarely seen works on display at Galerie Quynh mark a ten year period in his life, from 1998 to 2008. In his ‘Moonlight’ paintings, Trung recalls memories of the scorched earth of wartime Vietnam lit only by the moon’s silvery light. White, the Vietnamese colour of mourning, cuts through all the paintings. However, in sharp contrast, so too does the earthen pigments of rebirth and renewal.

Galerie Quynh has been supporting emerging and established artists from Vietnam and from around the world for thirteen years. This latest exhibition offers a uniquely Vietnamese take on universal issues. What the fish traders outside their doors make of that, however, is anyone’s guess.

Galerie Quynh is at 65 De Tham Street, District 1, HCMC. Website www.galeriequynh.com

Tales of Noodle Soup, Chewing Gum and Other Stories will run ‘till November 17.

VietNamNet/SGT