Full article here: https://news.laodong.vn/lao-dong-cuoi-tuan/nguyen-quan-va-su-nguyen-cau-ve-cai-dep-vinh-cuu-1450325.ldo
Nguyen Quan and the prayer for eternal beauty
Meeting Nguyen Quan again was a stroke of luck for me. We were both getting old, and we didn’t have much time or opportunities left. Our youth had long since slipped away. We no longer had the extroverted, sociable, and playful mindset, which was sometimes quite chaotic and chaotic, sometimes even very « herd-like » and useless, wasting a lot of time and energy…
Nguyen Quan arranged to meet me on a beautiful, sunny day in early winter at his painting and sculpture gallery for the « Temple of the Mother Goddess » project at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. Luckily, it was the day the exhibition ended and we were preparing to pack up, so we had time to sit together at a small cafe right in the museum yard.
Nguyen Quan is still as deaf as before, only his hearing is a bit hard of hearing so he has to talk very loudly, while Nguyen Quan has never been very noisy…
Perhaps it was more than thirty years ago that Nguyen Quan moved to Saigon and started a new life. He was more lonely, working quietly, drawing, sculpting and occasionally participating in exhibitions. It was also a fortunate coincidence that young artist Vu Hong Nguyen, who organized many creative camps and founded the Flamingo Contemporary Art Museum (Dai Lai, Hanoi) – apparently the largest outdoor sculpture park in Southeast Asia – met Nguyen Quan to discuss the project of the Song May Contemporary Art Museum… in the hope that Nguyen Quan would have an « artistic place » in this project space…
But it was not until a few years later, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out on this small and pitiful earth, including Vietnam, where the most painful and heavily affected place in the country was Ho Chi Minh City, where Nguyen Quan was living with his small family. He said that during those tragic days, he suddenly realized that the idea of composing for the Temple of the Mother Goddess was born and it marked a period of his greatest and most profound creativity…
He believes: « You cannot avoid suffering to be happy. Experiencing, believing in and reverence for the feminine side of the world, that is love, fertility, creativity and the inherent beauty of a human life, a destiny is true happiness ». Nguyen Quan believes that « art can help each of us do and achieve this ».
With his life experience, broad and profound knowledge, and artistic talent, Nguyen Quan came up with the idea of »chapel ». Chapelle (French) or Chapel (English) originally refers to a room or a small place for a group of Catholics to perform rituals, pray or do things related to religious worship. Our ancestors skillfully translated the meaning as chapel.
It is unclear whether Nguyen Quan was inspired by one of the four immortal saints of the ancient spiritual beliefs of the Northern Vietnamese, Mother Lieu Hanh, whose most famous place of worship is Phu Day (Nam Dinh) and the Vietnamese also have other Mother Goddess temples other than the Vietnamese Mother Goddess Religion…
Nguyen Quan said, for him « Mother Temple » is a contemporary public place for artistic and emotional experiences, spirituality… The theme that guides his project is « the veneration of the feminine of the universe and humanity. The feminine is love, fertility and beauty… ».
Nguyen Quan spent more than 4 years to carry out this project with 4 « panels of paintings » in oil on canvas. He said: « I relived 4 years with hundreds of authors, tens of thousands of works – most of them anonymous – as a general review of my love, my devotion to the history of human art… When I painted more than 350 of my women every day. I referenced nearly 20,000 images of women in works of art and real photos, extracted things that were compatible with my aesthetic beliefs for the theme in about 100 miniature paintings that will be included in 4 panels of paintings… ».
In addition to his paintings, Nguyen Quan has created an architectural and sculptural complex for the Temple of the Mother Goddess. The architecture includes the Moonlit Dry Garden, the Cloud Road, the Nghi Mon Gate, and the Quy Phuong Tower, which is a surreal, symbolic architectural work, and also a large-scale landscape sculpture in the future. The materials of Nguyen Quan’s statues are wood, stone, and bronze…
The 4 oil paintings hanging in the Temple are large in size 200x450cm. These 4 panels of paintings were created by Nguyen Quan based on inspiration and contemplation when reading the epic « De dat de nuoc » of the Muong ethnic group – the ancient Vietnamese people. They are probably the most important and beautiful works of art in this « Nguyen Mau Temple » project…
When we parted, he gave me a beautifully printed, large-format book called « The Temple of the Mother Goddess » and thanks to that, I was able to take a closer look at his works. It was even more touching when he respectfully dedicated it with « Thank you for our friendship ». I am lucky to have such a friend for more than 40 years and am grateful to him for having published the column « In a noisy place » (a poem by Trang Trinh Nguyen Binh Khiem, whose descendant Nguyen Binh Quan is) for nearly 12 years in the Lao Dong Weekend Newspaper. Nguyen Quan is the only writer who has not missed a single issue…
And like many people who love artistic creation, philosophical thoughts and the spiritual world of human beings, I really hope that one day soon there will be an art space of Nguyen Quan (as he said, certainly in a northern province, Vinh Phuc, Hoa Binh… for example).
