In a career spanning over two decades, Hoang Duong Cam (b. 1974, Hanoi) dexterously alternates between painting, photography, video, installation, performance, and collaborative projects. Central to his artworks are the often humorous, sometimes absurdist explorations of the complex mechanisms that connect the self and its surroundings. The density of detail seen in much of Hoang’s oeuvre stems from his extensive pool of disparate references: from the Socratic dialogues to Edo-era prints to quantum physics. Collated from history and contemporary reality, the artist’s fragmented narratives revel in confusion and uncertainty, laying bare the contradictions inherent in human thought and behaviour.
Hoang’s canvases, as layered with paint as they are with metaphors, are visual (re)constructions of liminal spaces, of distances irreconcilable. Though fascinated with historical and psychological boundaries, through his works the artist contends that boundaries are not a given but fluid and impermanent. When using media other than painting, Hoang often presents subtle, amusing projects that catch the viewer off-guard in their seeming straightforwardness. In juxtaposing and filtering through his eclectic interests, Hoang makes way for an unpremeditated sense of whimsy, or unease, or haunting melancholy to arise in his works. ...
