Vietnamese painter ...

Vietnamese painter ...

Mehru Jaffer
Contributor
Jakarta

The art of Thi D. Nguyen follows in the spiritual footsteps
of Zen Buddhist monks. He makes the space on his canvases look
empty, even though they are full of detail. His strokes in Sumi,
or Chinese ink, may be simple but the tales they tell are
complex, making the extraordinary work of Nguyen often seem
ordinary.

Nguyen is an engineer by profession but in spirit he is a monk
who practices a great deal of meditation. His aim is to transcend
ordinary reality in the hope of finding the true nature of his
own being.

He is apologetic for not being able to explain adequately in
words all of this and much more, as his search concentrates only
on non-conceptual awareness. His obsession is Nirvana and to
experience the nature of Buddha, or the nothingness when the body
and mind are perfectly matched and past, present and future
converge into one dazzling truth.

Like all monks, Nguyen too believes that it is not possible to
grasp the ultimate truth in words, so to communicate his inner
world he has chosen to use the expressive art of abstract
drawing, called Enzo in Zen Buddhism. "En" means circle, the
symbol of truth and perfection, and "zo" is form. Enzo drawings
are mainly completed in one stroke.

"My art is spontaneous. In order to achieve this I go through
extensive periods of contemplation, as I comprehend the inner
nature of the aesthetic object. And the higher the degree of
comprehension I am able to attain, the better the expression I
can subsequently manifest in my work," Nguyen said as he prepared
for his solo exhibition, Stone Conversations, which opened last
week.

The soft spoken Nguyen also revealed that at one stage in his
life he gave up painting altogether.

As a child in Vietnam painting came naturally to him, as he
watched his elders practice calligraphy. But in 1975, during the
Vietnam War, Nguyen, his brother, sister-in-law and their three
children crammed into a boat with hundreds of other refugees.

The boat sailed to Canada and at the age of 27, Nguyen was
expected to be practical and not to indulge in irrational and
non-profitable activities like meditation and painting.

Life was difficult so far from home and in an alien culture.
But Nguyen soon found himself busy, learning English and studying
chemical engineering.

It was only a decade later, when he found himself sitting
helplessly at the bedside of a friend who was dying of a terminal
disease, that he decided to communicate his feelings through
drawings.

His thoughts drifted back to his days as a child in his
village, and he remembered an endless carpet of lush, green rice
fields and animals everywhere. He also recalled how whenever
there was a sickness in the family, it was traditional to cook a
chicken for the ailing person.

The memory inspired Nguyen to draw countless chickens in
Chinese ink for his friend lying in a Canadian hospital. That
gesture proved so cathartic, that he has not put down his
paintbrush since.

Drawing has also helped him to come to terms with the war in
Vietnam and his status as an eternal refugee, and also taught him
to bask in the wondrous feeling of not being emotionally attached
to any one nation. His wife is Austrian and together with their
teenaged son they enjoy living in a kampung in Purvakarta, West
Java, with its landscape similar to that in Vietnam.

Nguyen is on a professional assignment in Java, but he paints
in his spare time, continuing to put down on paper his thoughts
as he continues to experience them, inside out.

He is a versatile artist, drawing not just in Chinese ink but
also painting on silk and dabbling in oil paint on canvas when
the mood strikes him, and a few years ago his work caught the eye
of Evie Miranda, an art collector and the founder of Persada Guru
Sukarno, a Central Jakarta boutique that deals in art objects.

The work that drew her to Nguyen was Twelve Faces, with one
face drawn in Chinese ink every month of the year while in a
trance of intense meditation.

"I fell in love with his artwork, which is able to evoke such
a creative series of thought despite its simplicity," says Evie,
who is the organizer of Nguyen's current exhibition.

Having lived in Germany for 16 years and enjoyed the freshness
of contemporary art, Evie was a little tired of the same pictures
that have been painted by Indonesian artists over the last
several decades. She finds Nguyen to be extremely original and
his work a combination of the modern and the traditional.

Thi Nguyen's works will be on exhibition in the lobby of the
Regent Hotel in Jakarta until Dec. 5.