Multimedia artist Bùi Công Khánh was born in 1972 and grew up in Danang, Vietnam, south of the 17th parallel that marked the North-South Demarcation Line before 1975, and whose father was called-up by the South Vietnamese Army. This wall panel from his exhibition, Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit Grenades: The American War in Vietnam examined through the art of Bui Cong Khanh, considers the paradoxes and strains in Vietnam today resulting directly and indirectly from the civil war and its aftermath. From Central Vietnam, and a toddler at war’s end, Khanh endorses neither the north’s nor south’s wartime position, and rather, in his art, trains a critical and pan-Vietnam lens on continuing tensions between north and south predicated on many factors, particularly the 1956-1975 civil conflict. Bùi Công Khánh, deeply interested in Vietnamese culture, deploys an artistic practice reliant on Vietnam’s two-millennia cultural heritage, which he uses to critical and aesthetic advantage in his thoughtful installations, performances, and videos. A Vietnamese citizen, Bùi Công Khánh sees no contradiction between loving Vietnam and its culture, and adopting a nuanced approach to recent history, a thought-process that comes to conceptual and aesthetic fruition in this exhibition.
Bùi Công Khánh is a Hoian-based Vietnamese artist whose visually and conceptually-sophisticated practice ponders social issues in Vietnam today. Khanh uses local Vietnamese materials such as ceramics, textile, and carved timber as covert clues to critical significance. His work is in major public collections in Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States.