Pictorial installation of Sơn Ta lacquer painting in barrel domed architectural space on fiberglass reinforced epoxy composite boards, metal structure and glass flooring.

Statement

Specula moves sơn mài from two dimensional wall painting to an architectural space that also asks the question of what could the image of lacquer be upon itself when unmediated through the experience of other image making mediums like oil painting or photography.  After Đổi Mới the innovations of lacquer art in Vietnam are for the most part stylistic, modeled after the successive modernist changes in painting throughout the 20th century embedding the thought habits of the original within them.  Specula adopts another strategy treating sơn ta as a substance and sơn mài as a process whose inherent qualities folds into its own image, one that neither depends on an object nor belong to a subject.  This approach, the recognition for sơn ta to be a substance as an image of its own substance-ness allows for a breaking away from a type of image making whose thought patterns are pre-established or in constant contention with its own past.  As such an image, Specula contains no tension within itself, there is no otherness, or contradiction.  It is in itself, of itself.

Specula is an observation of sơn ta’s ability to transmutate into distilled essences of basic matter unfolding into a series of mimetic forms – stone, bricks, water – that suggests the interior of a cave.  The metamorphosis that converts the lacquer in stone, in moss, in crystalline water, is not an optical representation of nature like those Baroque paintings in trompe-l'oeil.  Rather, this cave of the imagination is constructed with oxides, water, precious metals, resin from the earth – establishing a parallel with the natural matter of a cave. Layer by layer, as if condensing the slow process of geological formation based on sedimentation and erosion through the painting and sanding, the image of its own materiality emerges.

As a type of theatre, the word Specula refers to the medical instrument used to perform examinations of bodily cavities, in the act analogous to the viewer penetrating the evocative space of an imaginary womb.  Its name declares that this is not an object of artistic contemplation nor is it a public space available to the viewer in any light, time or context.  Rather this is about the act of prospecting, of looking with an intense and concentrated gaze at something that cannot be taken in at once as a whole in its entirety, but only through the slow examining of the sum of its parts.

Specula as an image is the result of the accumulation of time, environmental factors, moods and reflections and gestures transformed into a type of mirror. To the touch, the surface is cool and smooth as a mirror, contradicting the rich textures and deep colors beneath the surface plane giving a simultaneous perception of the essential and the illusory, evoking a mental image, beyond the optical.  This is the material quality for which sơn ta lacquer is a good conductor for reflection – in creating the momentary simultaneous contradiction between the essential and the illusory, the object and its space, optical textures and tactile smoothness.

Recurring throughout many cultures and eras, the cave is an enclosure for intimate thought.  Specula contains traces of moments in the history of human representation where we have appealed to fantasy and art in order to deal with the reality of our temporality.  Drawing from sources as diverse as the cave paintings of Altamira, Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Scrovegni Chapel, Buddhist temples, patterns of mathematical tessellations such as the Penrose tiling or sophisticated Islamic geometric systems, these pluri-cultural and spacial references extend the possibility of interpretation of multiple meanings.  Specula is space, instrument, and mirror that wants to incite a leap beyond the domestic and everyday.