MASKED FORCE solo exhibition by VÕ AN KHÁNH — organized by Sàn Art

Sàn Art

Jun 02 - Aug 08, 2020

Võ An Khánh is remembered for his uncanny, ethereal, even phantasmal photographs of the Vietnam War. In his pictures, we see the urgent and quotidian lives of the Southern Vietnamese resistance in the Mekong Delta—covert scouts, medics, musical ensembles and printing department workers who operate and survive in harmony with the sheltering mangrove forests. Across hamlets and villages, the revolutionists continue their didactic mission as they teach the national script to local schoolchildren. Fugitive classrooms are set up in corners of earth where the children’s tottering chalk marks, their inchoate Romanized letters, coalesce into the light of sun.

Whereas abundant journalistic snapshots tend to collect spectacles of ghastly pain and fortify demarcations between utterly simplified factions, Võ’s most haunting pictures unveil encounters, precarious and transient. These fleeting situations, reincarnated as calm flat photographic surfaces, live on not as hollow representation, but as animate presence, where the struggle, seen anew, becomes distinctly other. The imaged wartime of Võ An Khánh carries a self-replenishing, near-mythological energy that deforms or transforms the prefixed meanings of ideology, outlives the noise of dogma, outlasts the propaganda of discourse.

The photographs refuse to ossify into mere datasets of information: they breathe. They echo the odd, separate rhythm of a past that flies over the hic et nunc. They gather, condense, ex-press, ex-pose the elusive site where an event and an eternity concur. They throw their stigma into our sight. They withdraw themselves, and draw us, into a gravitational field of their own, teeming with what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes as the vital force that is veiled, reserved and boundless, the dense intensity that quietly keeps pictures sacred.


— Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên, co-curator, Sàn Art


Organization: Sàn Art
Exhibition Text: Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên
Artworks’ titles are provided by the artist.

VÕ AN KHÁNH

(b. 1936. Lives and works in Bạc Liêu, Vietnam)

Võ An Khánh was born in 1936, in the village of Ninh Quới in Hồng Dân District, Bạc Liêu Province, south-western Vietnam. During the 1960s and early 1970s, he traveled with a guerrilla unit to document the front line of the Vietnamese resistance against the U.S. in the Cà Mau region. He also managed the Photography Department of the local revolutionary cause and documented events related to frontline music and dance events. Between the years 1962 and 1975, Võ An Khánh staged a photographic exhibition in the exceptionally challenging condition of mangrove forests. His two well-known photographs, ‘Mobile Military Medical Clinic’ and ‘Extra-curriculum Political Science Class,’ were included in this traveling show, which Võ An Khánh himself developed on the spot using natural light.

Võ An Khánh’s photographs have been included in the exhibition “Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side” in 2002 (co-organized by the International Centre for Photography, New York) and various other international and local exhibitions and publications.

Sàn Art

Sàn Art, founded in 2007 in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) as an artist-initiated, non-profit art platform, has since become a leading art organization dedicated to nurturing and challenging common modes of viewing and thinking about visual art through exhibition, critical discourse, educational initiatives and residency programs. Past projects include Sàn Art Laboratory (2012-2015), an art residency program, and Conscious Realities (2013-2016), a series of events and publications on the Global South. In 2018, Sàn Art developed Uncommon Pursuits—a seminar-workshop for emerging Southeast Asian curators and opened a new gallery in downtown HCMC with a focus on intergenerational dialogues between modern and contemporary art. In this new chapter in the organization’s history, Sàn Art aims to be a community-driven space where experimental practices and fresh perspectives are fostered and shared among interdisciplinary artists, curators, scholars, cultural workers and audiences in the region.