From Monday the 28th of June until the 23rd of July, people will be able to experience a different take on the famous “Make Love – Not War” slogan of the 1960’s when Vietnamese artist Tran Duc Quy opens up his exhibition “Fusion” at L’Espace in Hanoi.
At first it looks like a group of pigs but a closer look reveals that it is in fact the behinds of two merged pigs with no heads showing at all. Tran Duc Quy, the artist behind the exhibition, which has been realised with the support from the Cultural Development and Exchange Fund (CDEF) under the Embassy of Denmark, wishes to remind the audiences of the saying from the 1960’s “Make Love – Not War” by showing two previously fighting pigs now merged in a loving embrace.
Speaking about the exhibition the ambassador and chairman of the CDEF, Mr. Peter Lysholt Hansen, said: “The message of this exhibition might be an old one but certainly not one that grows tired of time. Tran Duc Quy makes a new and interesting spin on it and in my opinion he will be one of the active factors that push the contemporary art development of this country ahead”.
The artist have found inspiration for the exhibition in the works of the Belgian painter René Magritte (especially the painting titled “Not to be Reproduced” from 1937) and the impressive view of two buffalos fighting, which he has grown up viewing at the Buffalo Fighting Festival in Hai Phong. Tran Duc Quy explains, that the buffalo fighting made him think of the stupidity of war which he illustrated by not giving the pigs any heads and thereby letting mentality and intelligence become insignificant. The headless, merged pigs thereby become the artist’s way of bringing new life to the famous saying “Make Love – Not War”.
