BAO TẢI DỨA

Between October and December 2018, Simon Médard was in Vietnam to take part in the Undecided Production’s live.make.share residence. With 5 other guest artists, he lived and worked in contact with the craftspeople in the traditional ceramics workshop of Hien Van, to the north of Hanoi. The region is conducive to motorbike rides and the escapades were rich in astonishments as a raw material. Whilst there, he filmed several videos, drew enormously as he often does and took much pleasure in trying his hand at ceramics. He also produced a considerable corpus of paintings on bags from which the installation Bao Tải Dứa is derived.

These bags made of woven plastic threads can be found almost everywhere in Vietnam. Shopkeepers use them as recipients for various products and materials, farmers keep their seeds in them and the inhabitants use them as bin bags. The artist was initially attracted by the strange brands and logos with which they were decorated and started to collect them, picking up new colours and shapes here and there. He then went on to use some of these bags as mediums for his paintings which he was already imagining exhibited filled with all sorts of things.

In the subjects he depicts, souvenirs of walks, local traditions and everyday objects can often be found, to which are added figures and gestures typically used by the artist. Each painting is a sort of symbol of his stay in Vietnam, summing up an exciting moment or beautiful story. Among these patterns, by way of example, there is a bouquet of flowers laid on a dustbin, as seen often by the artist during his voyage. Although these flowers seem to be recently picked, they are about to be thrown away. According to superstition, they should be removed from the house before they have started to wilt”.