Tomas Vu

Tomas Vu is an American artist whose primary media are painting, printmaking, and installation art. He was born in 1963 in Saigon, Vietnam and moved to El Paso, Texas at the age of ten. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1987, and his MFA from Yale University in 1990.

Work

In his painting series, "Napalm Morning" (1995-1999), Vu deals specifically with the memory of war, presenting a romantic view of the tragedy of war. The works depict Vu's recollection of the Tet Offensive, a terrifying but sublime sky illuminated from napalm explosions.

In his 2000 installation, "Hamburger Hill", at Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg, Austria, Vu constructed a recreation of the Battle of Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. A hill gridded with pure orange cadmium pigment was floated in the gallery space, recalling ideas of toxicity and Agent Orange, the deadly chemical defoliant used by the United States during the Vietnam War. 1000 cast wax soldiers, half yellow, half other colors, brought up notions of race. A performance in which Vu playfully lined up and then shot at the cast toy soldiers with rubber bands, picking them off one by one, and covering the gallery with the cadmium pigment, juxtaposed childhood war games with the grave realities of war.

In another work, "Killing Field" (2002), Vu created 125 skulls cast in wax and laid them in a gallery space so that they appeared to be emerging from the floor. Silver leafed doilies, reminiscent of grave markers, were placed on the skulls. Some formations of skulls were also placed, without markers, in an adjacent outside field so that one would stumble onto them. Vu's first body of work to break though to a psychedelic, fantastic, and at times dystopic world is an installation, "Opium Dreams", first created for a solo show at the Museum Haus Kasuya in Yokohama, Japan. In this series of drawings, paintings, and installations, Vietnam remains a cultural signifier, but an opium induced haze is also described.

Vu’s most recent work includes a series of paintings completed in 2006: "Black Ice". The series portrays an impossible space saturated with ambiguous and conflicting information. These paintings and works on paper consist of dense passages of line that create complex network structures and spatial relationships. Layers of silkscreen, paint, drawing and collage recall stratums of atmosphere, landscape, memory and time. The work draws upon Hieronymus Bosch's apocalyptic vision of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" as well as postmodern and poststructuralist ideas. Vu’s most recent bodies of work reference artificial intelligence, and draw from sources such as the 1964 film "The Last Man on Earth", and concepts like the Uncanny Valley hypothesis, and the Frankenstein complex.

Press

In his Brooklyn Rail review of Vu’s solo show at Von Lintel Gallery in New York, Gandalf Gavan proposes that Vu's works references Foucault's concepts of order and disorder, of an

'incongruous space,' a place where traditional knowledge, as established through the process of identification, is replaced by a state of simultaneity and non-definition.

Harv |Gavan|2006| Elisa Decker writes in her Art in America review,

each picture possesses its own disquieting beauty and is a world unto itself that one penetrates only slowly.

Harv |Decker|2006| p=208

Awards and Exhibition History

Tomas Vu has exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

He is presently the LeRoy Neiman Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University as well as the artistic director of the Neiman Center for Print Studies. He also has taught at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Massachusetts College of Art.

In 2002 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2003 he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant.

Tomas Vu has also exhibited under the names: Tomas Vu-Daniel, Tomas Daniel, and Thomas Daniel.

Image Gallery

References

Citation
last=Decker
first=Elisa
author-link=Elisa Decker
title=Tomas Vu at Von Lintel
newspaper= Art in America
pages=207–208
year=2006
date=October 2006

Citation
last=Gavan
first=Gandalf
author-link=Gavan Gandalf
title=Tomas Vu
newspaper=Brooklyn Rail
year=2006
date=May 2006
url=http://brooklynrail.org/2006/5/artseen/tomas-vu

cite press release
title = Tomas Vu
publisher = Von Lintel Gallery
date = May 2006
url = http://chelseaartgalleries.com/Von+Lintel+Gallery/Tomas+Vu+2006.html
accessdate = 2007-11-29

cite press release
title = Tomas Vu Daniel: Opium Dream
publisher = Amste Arte
date = April 2005
url = http://www.undo.net/cgi-bin/undo/pressrelease/pressrelease.pl?id=1114864621&day=1114812000
accessdate = 2007-11-29

cite press release
title = Lost World
publisher = O'Artoteca
date = March 2003
url = http://www.undo.net/cgi-bin/undo/pressrelease/pressrelease.pl?id=1046699372
accessdate = 2007-11-29

cite press release
title = Tomas Vu: Artist Lecture
publisher = Columbia University
date = 2007-10-30

External links

* [http://www.columbia.edu Columbia University]
* [http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/art/app/arts/visual_arts/faculty.jsp Columbia University School of the Arts]
* [http://arts.columbia.edu/neiman/ LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies]
* [http://www.hotelpupik.org Hotel Pupik]