Obsession with origin

In 40 years living far from home, female painter To Bich Hai was always obsessed by the questions: “Who am I? Where do I come from?”
These questions urged her to return to Vietnam to search for her roots and these questions went into her artworks as strange and mysterious sources of feelings.

The life of To Bich Hai is very interesting.

She is a Tay ethnic woman who was born in the Vietnam-China border area, Mong Cai. Her father brought her to the south when she was very small. As a little girl, she revealed a talent for painting.

As her family had economic difficulties, she wasn’t able to enter university to work in the aviation sector. After that she continued studying and earned a scholarship to study painting in Switzerland.

Leaving Vietnam at the age of 20, her memories of her home country were of a land of war and suffering and many losses and pain. In 1967, she left the Lausanne City Art Institute. She then moved to France.

Living far from home, memories about her childhood always remained in To Bich Hai’s mind, along with questions about her origin. These became a principle topic in her works: the fate and origin of humans.

This small Vietnamese woman has given nearly 20 exhibitions overseas, but her dream was always to have an exhibition at home.

During short visits to Vietnam to do charity work, she always took advantage of free time to go to mountainous regions, wishing to seek her roots and her family. After tens of years searching hopelessly, she finally found her relatives in the northern mountainous provinces of Cao bang and Lang Son.

The search not only brought To Bich Hai to her native place but also helped her get a unique collection of 50 items of clothing of ethnic minority people. After ten years collecting and researching traditional clothing of ethnic minority groups in Vietnam and in other countries, she opened an exhibition of these unique clothes in Paris in 2007.

This year this exhibition opened at the Le Ba Dang Art Centre, 15 Le Loi, Hue city on June 7 on the occasion of the Hue Festival 2008. The collection will be displayed at Tu Tuong Park and brought through some major streets of Hue.

Painter To Bich Hai also opened an installation artwork belonging to the Land Art trend, named Souls of an Unjust Victims, which includes 100 block prints made of woodworm-eaten wood pieces featuring faces with different feelings, at Park 7, Le Loi road, Hue city from June 2-11.

“I choose timber for my work because I love ancient houses in Hue. They are evidence of pain through the ages,” she said.

(Source: DNSG)

Tag: Exhibition , Festival , Hue , Hue Festival , Hue Festival 2008 , Lang Son , Tay Ethnic , Vietnam , Vietnamese

Obsession with origin

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