[Vnbiz] [nhipsong] “Peace & Harmony: A Journey to Vietnam” photography exhibition

Fri Apr 27 19:04:01 PDT 2007

The Institute for Vietnamese Culture
       

      The Institute for Vietnamese Culture & Education (IVCE), is a New York 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that is a leader in promoting Vietnamese culture and assisting Vietnamese students study abroad in American universities.


     New York (April 27th, 2007).

      IVCE cordially invites you to “Peace & Harmony: A Journey to Vietnam” photography exhibition by Thang Tran. Thang Tran arrived in the U.S. in 1991 and currently resides in Connecticut. He graduated with a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1997 and works at Pratt & Whitney. He is the President of the Institute for Vietnamese Culture & Education (IVCE) since 2000 and a Board member of The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. He is the editor-in-chief of NhipSong Magazine since 1996. He has great passion for promoting Vietnamese culture in the U.S and for contributing educational projects in Vietnam. He has organized many Vietnamese cultural programs in U.S., including film screenings, cultural seminars, art exhibits, and musical performances. He has hosted well-known scholars, musicians, poets, film directors and artists from both the U.S. and Vietnam for cultural programs in the U.S. He has organized 15 seminars on "Study Abroad in the U.S" in Vietnam since 2002. He established the on-going NhipSong Book Drive program in 1998, and to date, the drive has collected 2,000 text books and 2,000 professional journals for 5 university libraries and 2 national libraries in Vietnam. Thang Tran was honored with the "National Young Community Leaders Recognition" award from NAVASA in 2003.

      Date of exhibition: May 5th - June 5th 2007.
      Place: Galerie Brigitte
      11411-I Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190.
      Tel. 703.860.2345

      Opening Reception: 10am - 11.30am. Saturday May 5, 2007.
      At this special event, Professor Nguyen Ngoc Bich will offer a discussion on Thang Tran’s photographs at the exhibition. The photographer will also be present for the discussion.

      This photography exhibition is IVCE’s fundraising event for the ViSTA program and seminars, a necessary supplement to the “Study Abroad in the U.S” conference in Vietnam. We will sell photographs at the exhibition; however, you can also make orders via mail or online. These photographs will be sure to add charm to your home, business, or office, highlight the beauty and elegance of Vietnam.

      To order photographs: http://www.ivce.org/book.php?bookid=MS00000004  

      --//--

      Reviews 

      Trần Thắng thích nhiếp ảnh, không phải chỉ dùng máy ghi lại những danh lam thắng cảnh mà lại nhìn cảnh vật bên ngoài với nội tâm. Nên không cần thấy, hay không muốn thấy cái sôi động của một cuộc sống cuồng loạn, mà chỉ nhìn thấy trời cao, biển rộng, nhìn chiều tà, ngắm giọt sương trên lá, cánh hoa chớm nở, ghi lại cái tĩnh lặng đầy chất thơ đầy thiền vị để nhớ tới nước nhà trong thanh bình trầm lặng, hình ảnh thân thương của cảnh vật của con người. Những bức ảnh được nhìn với đôi mắt nghẹ sĩ và một con tim chứa đầy tình thương đất nước, con người Việt Nam, có lung linh cái hồn của con người, cái duyên dáng, mà nhiều khi chúng ta thoáng gặp trong phút gì ấy.

      -- Professor Tran Van Khe.

      Photographers often say that it is impossible to take a bad picture in Vietnam. The landscapes are so varied, the light so thrilling, and the people and their things so filled with the beauty of old places, ancient times, and modern ironies that even tourists with their digital cameras come home with treasures.

      But photographs that desire to go deeper require more: a feel for the history hidden in the frame, a sense of the lives that are caught there, and—most importantly—the artist’s compassionate eye that has searched out moments of color and composition in the pursuit of something larger, more eternal.

      Tran Thang’s photographs go beyond the “wow” of a wonderful postcard. Whether it is an image of two women in a boat, or whisk brooms strung along a wall, or water beaded on lotus pads, or a man rolling a cart down a road by empty store fronts, Thang captures textures in sea and sky, in wood, stucco, and still water that are like paintings. His sense of color is exquisite. His feel for people going about their lives is affecting.

      -- John Balaban, author Path, Crooked Path and Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong.

      Tran Thang’s 60 odd photographs taken in all parts of Vietnam from 1996 to 2006 is a record of his inward journey to regain his spiritual lineage of Vietnam.

      There is no photograph of ostensible wealth or flaunting of modern comforts. Tran Thang appears totally uninterested in them. Perhaps he has seen enough of them somewhere else. There are, however, many photographs that capture the seemingly endless human struggle for survival. A driver bends his back to push his small cyclo, buried under a mountain of objects, forward. He is surrounded by the three white paint panels on the ground as if he were trying to escape from their enclosure, freezing him and his life into a moment of endless travail.

      There are two sand dune photographs – a prerequisite from any traveler in Central Vietnam. Each is startling in its own way. The first pictures two slanted figures pushing mightily against the invisible force of the environment, under a strangely textured sky. Life of a mother and daughter seems to be frozen in a moment of determined struggle against huge odds. The second showcases two hatted children playing in the sand, with swaths of sand flowing like fluttering strips of silk from their hands. It’s a strangely composed image, as if they were archetypal figures playing with the eternity of time, or Lao-Tzu’s idea of the indifference of heaven.

      Vietnam is in transition, where an ancient past intersects gingerly with a modern presence, leading to a still to be determined future. Tran Thang has an eye for the happy serendipity of things and places. Like the unexpected configuration of the clouds, unrelated things by change come together in a suddenly related way, only to dissolve again into its unrelated journey. Who can tell when and why? Like the unintended emplacement of two incense holders at the Ly Thai To shrine. One – exuberant in a shower of red incense sticks held together in a traditional vase decorated in the Chinese ink painting; the other – a single stem of rose in a modern discardable – a La Vie plastic bottle. Two objects from two different eras, united silently in a single moment of ancestor veneration. 

      Vietnam is a land of shrines, temples, and their most ubiquitous symbol – the delicate lotus flower. Tran Thang captures two of their reincarnations, one from King Tu Duc tomb and the other from King Minh Mang tomb. In the first, the lotus flower, perfectly silhouetted with its sister bulb as if the latter were ready to burst open in a sea of exuberant broadleaves. Beyond in the background sprinkle 5 shimmering red points – the ever-present possibility of the flowering of nature – human and non-human. The second is perhaps one of the most impressive photos of the exhibition in terms of composition, color, and light. The deep greenness of the leaf is captured exquisitely in a series of circles, curvatures, and textures. The transparent drops of water balanced precariously on these broadleaves remind one of how delicate, beautiful, and quintessentially impermanent our world is, or could be. We are what we see.

      -- Nguyen Ba Chung


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