Vietnamese artist’s Hong Kong exhibition on endangered species gives this meat-loving city something to think about
Tuan Andrew Nguyen insists his mixed media exhibition at the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery is not activism, but that he wants people to look at and question our relationship with animals
Tuan Andrew Nguyen could not bring himself to eat meat for months after watching Le Sang des Bêtes (Blood of the Beasts), a short documentary by Georges Franju from 1949 containing gory slaughter scenes of horses and cattle.
In the video, titled My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017) – also the title of the exhibition – two animal spirits conduct a debate about the culpability of man in the destruction of nature throughout Vietnam’s history.
One voice belongs to the last Javan rhinoceros, who was killed by poachers in Vietnam in 2010. The other belongs to Cu Rua, a very old turtle that died in Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake in 2016. Some Vietnamese believe it to have been the descendant of the mythical Golden Turtle that lent a magic sword to King Le Loi to help him defeat the Chinese in the 15th century.
The spirits put forth their opposite viewpoints as contrasting scenes from real life via two television screens. Beautiful, sweeping shots of Vietnam’s forests, which boast of some of the world’s richest biodiversity, contrast with skulls of extinct animals on display in a museum, a tiger pacing inside a cage, gruesome images of cattle being killed and dismembered in a slaughterhouse, and little egrets having their feathers plucked – seemingly still alive – before being roasted over a makeshift pit by two women in a field.