Le The Lam – Pham Thanh Toan

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Craig Thomas Gallery is pleased to announce Le The Lam – Pham Thanh Toan, a duo exhibition of new works by the eponymous Dalat-based artist Lê Thế Lãm and Saigon-based artist Pham Thanh Toan.  The opening reception for LTT-PTT will be held at the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Association’s exhibition space on Pasteur Street in Saigon on 12 December 2023 from 6:30-9:00pm.

Recognizing a friendship and artistic affinity, Lam and Toan first collaborated on a duo exhibition in 2016 when they were both fourth-year students at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts.  LTT-PTT marks the seven-year anniversary of the artists’ first show together and shines a light on the progress both have made in their practices but also how much they have diverged in their personal forms of expression.

Pham Thanh Toan’s latest collection of works stand as a visual paean to his rural upbringing on a small family farm in Quang Binh Province in the shadow of mountains roughly twenty kilometres from the border with Laos.  Toan’s paintings evoke a particular stage in the rice harvest when the water has receded from the flooded fields and thick layer of silt and a few rice stalks are all that remain.  At this point, farmers would return to the fields to burn the remaining weeds and rice stalks and prepare the land for the Winter-Spring crop.

Toan says, “For this painting series, I used a mixture of silt and dry straw from my father’s field as a blending medium for colors. Farming tools, which are also relics of my family and the people of Quang Binh, were incorporated to help me complete the artworks.  The inspiration for this painting series comes from the tranquil and dynamic landscapes of the rural fields, where I once had a strong connection. Through this, I also want to honor the diligent and hardworking laborers who bent their backs on the meager land to provide for their children’s education.”

Where Toan is seeking to express his feelings about a physical space, Le The Lam’s paintings are focused on a terrain that lies within the human brain and spirit.  Lam has the sensibility of a poet and many of the figures in his paintings seem as if they might be the fruits of some form of psychoanalysis.  They are often naked and prone and they speak to Lam’s search for the meaning of life and his efforts to express that universal struggle through his art.

Lam says, “Many times I have felt as hopeless as a fire that goes out at the end of the day.  I just wanted to lie there – deep in darkness – thinking about humans, a particularly sensitive, cruel and dangerous animal.  But I have never given up; still hoping to see the warmth of people out there.  Hope has always been a bit of summer sunshine that has warmed me and helped me persevere throughout the coldness of life.  I have tried to struggle on the narrow path of life, trying to find an open path to walk on – Free, wild.”

All are invited to visit the Le The Lam – Pham Thanh Toan exhibition which offers the opportunity to view the latest works of two of Vietnam’s most intriguing and accomplished young artists.  Artists who have remained friends and influences on each other through the first seven years of their careers, but who exhibit profoundly different approaches to expressing the idiosyncratic ways of manifesting the ideas and emotions that animate their work.