Little Flowers

Hung’s latest collection owes its title to the artist’s first solo exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City in 2011 at Craig Thomas Gallery, And Flowers Showered. Little Flowers, like the artist’s earlier collection, is inspired by Osho’s discourses on Zen Buddhism, but while the previous collection left large empty spaces in which floating sal or shala flowers showered from the sky, the newest works are less meditative and leave no space for the spiritual void.

This more playful series of smaller works is like an explosion of colourful, surreal landscapes populated by small fairy-like anthropomorphic creatures that owe much of their stylistic rendering to a modernist Cubist style of portraiture. Such creatures become at times half human, half animal, almost like mythical creatures that appear in our strangest dreams. A ubiquitous black and white figure, resembling a Japanese-style deity floating on a cloud, stands perhaps as a symbol of peaceful vigilance over the viewer, the ‘dreamer’.

In Little Flowers, there is a greater focus on life on earth, on humanity and its potential, rather than a spiritual approach. Backgrounds are decorated with what the artist refers to as “little flowers, and flying spots of colors” that are like “seeds falling to the ground, awaiting or seeking wet soil to germinate in.” In an orderly chaos, these seeds fall endlessly from the sky, suggesting a hopeful regeneration of the cycles of life.

Nature is an ever present theme in Hung’s work, whether in stylised patterns suggestive of mountains and water, or in cutout collage flowers and leaves. The artist also draws inspiration from the diversity of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities and their traditional cultures. In Little Flowers 9, for example, Hung uses details that are inspired by patterns from woven fabrics and textiles of the Thai ethnic minority’s bed sheets and pillow covers. In Free Days 2, flower and cloud motifs recall traditionally Oriental decorations.

Little Flowers is a cheerful, vivacious series of works that once again embodies Hung’s skillful synthesis of western and eastern cultural and artistic references, rendered in unique and original tableaux. Through Little Flowers, the artist seeks to uncover the seeds of existence, the love of life and the benevolence of human nature.