Tô Ngọc Vân - Thiếu Nữ Bên Hoa Huệ
Tô Ngọc Vân - Young Woman By The Lilies
*this essay was written at Kingston School Of Art, as one of my first assignment*
‘I think that a beautiful picture describes my feeling. Therefore, I only believe that a man full of emotions will become a famous artist.’ - Tô Ngọc Vân
Artists have never made art because they are artists. They make art because they are humans. Similarly, art has never existed for the purpose of satisfying our carnal pleasure of admiring Beauty, it exists because it has become a necessity for humans to know that we are humans. Art exists because it gives humans a glimpse of what humans were, and what humans have always been throughout history. Great art has always been the giving of a soul to touch another soul, as the great Goethe once remarked in Faust: ‘From deep within you speak sincere // And with a charismatic fire // Compel the hearts of those who hear.’ Art hence is the manifestation of one’s soul, and beautiful art comes from the soul of the beautiful - the Beauty that never comes from the highest place in the sky but comes from the deepest place in a human heart.
Tô Ngọc Vân (1906 - 1954) from the day he entered the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (the Indochine College of Fine Arts) to the day of his death dedicated his soul to painting what the failure of language can never describe - Beauty. Artist Trần Văn Cẩn, a lifelong colleague and friend of Vân remarks: ‘Vân became acquainted with painting and was entirely attracted by it.’ The artist’s magnum opus Thiếu Nữ Bên Hoa Huệ (Young Woman By The Lilies) is the most influential artwork in Vietnamese art before the August Revolution in 1945, arguably of all time. Like the Renaissance greats, Tô Ngọc Vân’s art worships the poetic, ephemeral form of feminine beauty, but unlike the Renaissance greats, Vân rejects the obsession with perspectives, anatomy, symmetry, he rather focused on finding harmony in his overall composition. Vân’s light brush strokes and his use of matte colours evoke a dream-like trance in this painting, as Miss Sáu, the Hanoian model depicted lightly tilts her head as if she is lost in the passage of Time itself, unaware of the voyeuristic viewers. The woman is in reverie, in melancholy, in nostalgia, the viewers never know. Vân’s understanding of rhythm, of shapes, of forms, shows the subtle fragility of human contemplation, yet the sorrow of Van’s heroine is bathed in the hopeful sunlight, creating a poetic juxtaposition of complex human feelings. The traditional Vietnamese costume Áo Dài evokes not a feeling of lustful sexual desire, but reflects Vân’s chaste view of celestial women's beauty, a common motif in his other works, ranging from a variety of mediums such as oil paints, watercolour on silk, charcoal. The slim curve highlighted by the Áo Dài is submerged in ethereal light, like the waves of the ocean lightly hitting the soft sand, the water is warmed and shined by the hot sun. Young Woman By The Lilies represents the esoteric concept of Beauty itself, or at least, how a proletariat man sees Beauty.
But that beauty is quite out of reach to viewers. Artist Trần Bình Lộc said: ‘In terms of artistic field, Tô Ngọc Vân’s career is worth being appreciated because he had a good vision, a quality that not all the artists did.’ (Nguyen Art Gallery). This vision is Tô Ngọc Vân's lifelong effort to describe the indescribable, this transcendent beauty that is unexplainable, only shown. It is the purest form of beauty that Tô Ngọc Vân is attempting to depict, the purest beauty is always found around us, but no matter how alluring it is, one can never really touch it, quite transcends what one can fetch, that only a pure soul can even attempt to describe. The women in the works of Tô Ngọc Vân lives only in the works of Tô Ngọc Vân, in a small box of her own, with her little vague, poetic subtleties, in a timeless world, rebelling against the passage of Time. The time of Tô Ngọc Vân’s career is the age of tragedy, of hopelessness, of the sorrow under the reign of the French Colonialists. The living condition in Vietnam from the 1940s to the mid-1950s was appalling as time passes unkindly, viciously and brutally: the 7-year-long First Indochina War and the Northen Vietnamese Famine of 1945 marked a dark and sorrowful in Vietnamese history. Yet Tô Ngọc Vân is a man who loves life as much as an artist can love art, or a poet can love poetry: the sorrow in his work carries a glimpse of hope, the gloominess of the atmosphere is grazed subtle by light, and the young woman in Young Woman By The Lilies continue to live defiantly in her small world bathed in warmth next to the forever-blossomed flower, indifferent to nature. To be the heroine of the art of Tô Ngọc Vân is to be the manifestation of the defiance against the brutality of life, to become a timeless iconoclast of the harsh passing flow of Time. Today, Young Girl By The Lilies still remains to be a reminder of the Beauty one can still find in a world of suffering with enough Hope.
The untimely death of Tô Ngọc Vân at the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in the First Indochina War saddened the Vietnamese fine art community. Artist Trần Văn Cẩn reminisced: ‘Upon hearing the sad news, we tried not to believe it was true, hoping he was able to hide somewhere during the bombardment. Not until Nguyễn Đình Thi (Vietnamese writer) and some other combatants came back from the battlefield, bringing his rucksack and his painting folder, did we despair.’ (Medium). The work of Tô Ngọc Vân to this day still influences the Vietnamese contemporary art scene. His paintings were never simply portraits of young Vietnamese women, it is quite delicately, the portrait of Silence itself. From the loud sounds of bombs, bullets, and agony of war when the artist passed away from a fatal bombing as a soldier - to the modern era of dissonance noises of the media, of the restless age of information, the cacophony never seems to go in recess. The art of Tô Ngọc Vân depicts the treasured tranquillity of Silence, a melancholic intermission in the unforgiving, unstoppable flow of Time that is quite inaccessible to us all.
Bibliography
To Ngoc Van, Wikipedia, 2022
Young Girl By The Lilies, Wikipedia, 2022
Tran Van Can, Wikipedia, 2022
Pham, L., To Ngoc Van: Artist Of The Soul, Medium, 2020
Trieu, T.D., Life Of Famous Artist To Ngoc Van, Eye Gallery, 2018.
Phuong, A., Họa sĩ Tô Ngọc Vân – Nhân cách lớn của nền hội họa Việt Nam (Artist Tô Ngọc Vân - The Great Personality Of Vietnamese Art), Design & Art Magazine Vietnam, 2021
To Ngoc Van Biography, Vietnam The Art Of War
To Ngoc Van’s Conception Of Art, Nguyen Art Gallery, 2018
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