Truong Bé, 2006-2009, or language without words, permeated by sound

Born in Quang Tri, Truong Bé entered an intermediate Fine Arts teaching program in 1962, and graduated 3 years later. From 1966 to 1969, he taught at the Nguyễn Văn Bé school in Guilin, China, reserved for students from South Vietnam. He returned to Hanoi to pass the Hanoi Fine Arts competitive examination in July 1969. In October 1972, as a young married man in his thirties, he was mobilized for “Battlefield B” (i.e. South Vietnam), leaving his wife and family in Haiphong.

After undergoing military training at the “105 Hoa Binh” school, in November he left in a convoy for Quang Binh and Quang Tri, the two martyred regions of the Second Indochina War.

At the beginning of 1973, he was assigned to the Quang Tri Department of Culture and Information, with the priority mission to produce propaganda paintings, in particular large posters (4x3m) urging people to fight. He graduated from the “Beaux-Arts d’Hanoi” in 1974, his principal master was Luong Xuan Nhi.

In this unique lacquer (135 x 225 cm), Truong Bé reiterates the principles of his abstract compositions: an abundance of black or gold interlacing and convolutions, and the use of eggshell on a cinnabar red background. But within this abundance of red and gold, with embossed lacquer in places, the artist abandons abstraction to plunge us into what he experienced as an actor: the war, on the North side. Loaded bodois, trucks, tanks, ammunition, gullies and mountains. There’s no fighting, no epic heroism, but everyone goes off to die. A secular procession.

Truong Bé transfigures sacrifice, not war. As a direct actor-spectator of war, he refuses to describe it realistically.

Yes, there are bodoïs, trucks, mountains, roads and tanks. But they themselves are not real: while the North Vietnamese army essentially used Soviet T-54 tanks or their Chinese “copy” the Type 59, as well as a few T-55s, the armored vehicle Truong Bé depicts is like a truncated quotation of this T-55, getting closer to it mainly because of the turret. He, the legitimate, direct witness, tells us that for an artist, reality has no meaning.

Truong Bé uses a language without words, permeated by sound, a vision without images but bursting with color.

Jean-François Hubert