VietNamNet Bridge – Pursuing a new art trend in Vietnam – pop art – painter Tran Trung Linh has the opportunity to show his thought and experience about a material world which is invading man’s soul. For him, drawing is a way to live.
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. Due to its utilization of found objects and images, it is similar to Dada. Pop art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists.

Linh has followed this movement for several years. He said he is interested in inspirations from pop art. Using acrylic paint, Linh often chooses families topics like a beggar walking across a wall full of advertisements of luxurious products, an international or a local celebrity and even himself in his paintings.

Seeing Linh’s paintings, the audiences may feel that he is joking and intentionally distorts the real life through his thought. But Linh confirmed: “Pop art is not a joke”. That is a chance for him to divorce from seriousness to look the life at a different angle and to criticize a material world that is tightening each individual in society.

After a long preparation, the artist opened his pop art exhibition on August 1, at the Saigon University in HCM City. The event will last on August 5.

Linh, 34, was just invited to an exhibition in Bali, Indonesia. His works attracted the interest of the local media and audiences.

PV