Lunar Breccia: Group Exhibition

Galerie Quynh is thrilled to present Lunar Breccia, a group exhibition featuring new and previously unseen works by Hoang Duong Cam, Sandrine Llouquet, Keen Souhlal, Vo Tran Chau, Do Thanh Lang, Hoang Nam Viet and Nghia Dang.

 

Like Alluvium in 2018, this unusual grouping of emerging and established artists, each with distinct working methodologies, thematic concerns and use of materials, highlights the artists’ ongoing projects and serves as a preview of focused solo exhibitions to be presented at the gallery in the coming years.

The term lunar breccia refers to a classification of moon rocks created by meteorites colliding with the lunar surface. The debris from these impacts, comprising shattered pieces of ancient lunar rocks and meteoric fragments, are welded together in a fine-grained matrix — grains which seem to keep the motley of angular rocks floating in suspension.

As these fragments merge into a single breccia, the structure and its parts serve as an allegory for the collection of works on display – pieces which form part of ongoing projects, or are explorations for future bodies of work. Just as the lunar fragments raise questions of their lithic origins, the works on show invite viewers to consider the artists’ practices beyond the scope of the exhibition. The breccial texture reflects how this contextual labour of art — the research, the influences, the planned encounters and chance discoveries — can be at once structured and random (or perhaps serendipitous).

Though lunar here has immediate associations with the moon and thus evokes the notion of site — of outer-space, of galaxies, of landscapes real or imagined — the word also brings to mind ideas of time. Using the lunar calendar as a point of departure, the exhibition looks to alternative ways and systems of perceiving time. Even in the artists’ use of varied media there emerges a quiet ode to the idiomatic process of watching paint dry. As one waits for clay to fire, or for the pigment of young persimmons to seep and soak into each grain of fabric, the importance of time is denoted through the transformation of materials rather than productivity or output. In the shift away from linear timelines towards explorations of non-chronology, the exhibition and its artworks offer entry to heterotopia — a space that concurrently exists in time yet outside of time, both mirroring yet upsetting what occurs beyond its boundaries.

From this strangely humble moon rock stems alternate ideas of time and space. As one wanders through the gallery space, lunar breccias can lead one down new routes of interpretation. Indeed, the word breccia suggests openings, passageways, even breakthroughs. Much like lunar breccias, then, the coming together of these seemingly disparate works is as much a union of the old as it is a creation of the new.