On its waves painted in black, in oil, in thick layers, the memory of the boat-people bruised by war throbs: welcome to the world of Bao Vuong, Franco-Vietnamese artist who “makes the sea speak”.
In large format or smaller, about twenty of his paintings are exhibited at the Parisian gallery A2Z, dedicated to contemporary artists, particularly Asian ones. Barely presented, the series “The crossing” (the crossing) has been sold and orders are pouring in, marvels the 44-year-old artist, like his gallery owner friends, Ziwei-Léa and Anthony Phuong.
As if sculpted with a knife in black oil paint, bas-relief style, in symbiosis with a smooth sky where clouds sometimes appear, the waves of Bao Vuong invite the visitor to a dark, yet solar, nocturnal journey on the sea. : the one he lived in 1979, a baby barely one year old, with his sister and his parents, fleeing Vietnam and the consequences of the war.
Through an extraordinary play of shadows and light, amplified by light spots located above the paintings, the waves and their eddies show an infinite, sparkling ocean, in which the observer takes the place of the exiles, on board of a boat. The experience hypnotizes.
survivors
From the deep black, foam and luminous sparkles spring, sparkling like diamonds, mingled with the reflections of the moon: “this light is like an inner beacon that everyone carries within him and which guides us in the most difficult moments”, told AFP the artist, with a look full of sweetness.
“We are all survivors… even if I did not experience it like my mother who kept us above water, my sister and I, I carry this story within me,” he adds. “The waves are getting bigger and bigger, it allows me to have this meditative side. I am in connection with the people who have experienced this tragedy as if they were guiding my hand”, he continues, describing his work as “cathartic “.
“Unlike many artists who represent the sea, Bao gives it a voice. He reconciles art and the neophyte public”, says Anthony Phuong. One thinks of the painter Soulages who brings out the light from his “beyond-black”.
“Initiatory journey”
His story and that of his family, he only discovered it at the age of 27, during a trip to Vietnam. “My aunts threw themselves on me crying because they had only seen me as a baby. My mother then told her story for the first time,” he confides, moved. “I really learned where I came from. This initiatory journey was a click”.
One of his canvases represents his mother’s face in the sky, an evanescent mountain and “allegory of resilience, courage, tenacity”.
As with thousands of refugees, the family fled at night. She left the Mekong Delta with many others in a precarious boat.
Parked in a camp in Malaysia for about ten months after suffering three pirate attacks, she was again “thrown” into the sea, on board a boat, “without engine, without water or food” and owed his salvation only to “a cloud in the middle of the blue sky which started to rain, a miracle”, says Bao Vuong.
Recovered by a humanitarian ship, his family returned to France.
The young man followed an artistic training in Toulon and worked in several NGOs, before returning to Vietnam to start a career as an artist, then returning to France. He has produced several performances and installations always linked to exile paying tribute to the many migrants who died while fleeing their country.
“I’m learning to stay in the flow of life. To accept the end, the death that awaits us all, it’s good to say to yourself I was that wave and I will join the ocean“, he says.