Nguyen Thai Tuan

Black Painting No. 52

In Nguyen Thai Tuan’s Black Paintings series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mainly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war. They evoke the absence of oneself, corporal dispossession, but also the story of a society still under authoritarian power. In this way, the absence of faces symbolically refers to censorship. The painted characters are overall described in a typology: we only know if they are men or women; monks, prisoners, or soldiers. The monochrome background accentuates the theatrical aspect of the composition that stages puppets and ghosts. Some of the paintings seem to develop a narration that is left pending, incomplete.

Photography is a manifest reference in the series: testimony to what has occurred, inexorably related to death, absence, and loss. The black or dark background creates a space where memory can arise, where the stories still need to be written and a negative space. “Obscurity always reveals mystery and the unknown. Obscurity forces us to search further and look for the truth, but also creates fear and violence” (Nguyen Thai Tuan).