36 South Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
May 16 — 26, 2002 Duyen Nguyen T.P. — 100 Drawings
"THE MASKS"
The Vietnamese traditional theater, "Hat Boi", has been a popular performing art for hundreds of years. Similar to, and borrowing from many Chinese stories and legends, "Hat Boi" has been deeply absorbed into the cultural life of the Vietnamese people. The two principal factors of this performing art are the mask and movement. The masks symbolize different characteristics of personalities and the movement expresses their emotion.
"The Masks" depict the complicated personalities of the stage, which could illustrate a tiny world of humanity. How interesting it is to discover the various characteristics of individuals under their masks on the stage — and in real life! It has been a very long process to form typical samples of masks that represent various personalities of theater — good/ bad or mean/pleasant people.
Trying to put a mask on a piece of ‘DO’ (a Vietnamese traditional hand-made paper) has been an amazing and colorful experience. A new visual world has opened to me. My series of "The Masks" has developed more quickly than I expected. Many new effects of the ‘DO’ have emerged — amazingly — during the process of creating. This soft and durable paper (hand-made by a thousand year old technique) adopts and reacts flexibly — enhancing the expression of ideas in numerous modern and contemporary styles. It is a great adventure in cultural identity, modernism, and traditional materials of Viet Nam.