Suitcases Of A Pilgrim

Suicases Of A Pilgrim

Series

Vũ Dân Tân early career passion for creating art objects led to his most renowned series of three-dimensional works titled ‘Suitcases of a Pilgrim’, which commenced in 1995 and evolved periodically until 2006

Cardboard packaging boxes, primarily cigarette boxes, were meticulously cut out, painted, and subsequently transformed into small sculptures. These sculptures were arranged in wooden with glass lids, which were utilized by street vendors for the sale of cigarettes and other small items during the 1980s and 1990s, enabling them to swiftly pick up the box and vanish when law enforcement approached. The ‘Suitcases of a Pilgrim’ series was first publicly showcased at the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, held at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia, in 1996. Professor Ian Howard, curator of Vietnamese art for this exhibition wrote:

❝ Tân’s work could be described, at its most significant level, as talking back to used institutions. Perversely, his use of decoration relates to a connection between the individual and the state. His works deny the reality of their original materials and hence attempt to defy the increasing supremacy of the legitimate economy by recycling rubbish and turning it into new, real things that claim to be works of art…
In his own private way, Tan confounds the inevitable and immutable processes of the world of objects by changing the value and meaning of already used things ❞
Ian Howard. ‘Vietnamese Artists: Making Do, Digging In, Breaking Out’, catalogue of the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 1996, p. 50

The series titled ‘Suitcases of a pilgrim” encompasses various images and can thus be categorized into subseries, the most substantial of which are 'Masks', 'Insects', and 'Venuses'

❝ Pilgrim’s glass-lidded boxes, containing cut-out cardboard packaging sculpture, exemplify the roving eye as they play with containment, display, protection, freedom, inclusion and exclusion. The series borrows its formally and conceptually fundamental display cases from Hanoi’s illicit street hawkers… The peddlers’ transgressive behaviour is an invisible but central tension of the work. ‘Suitcase of a Pilgrim’, in its allusion to citizen disobedience, flirts with subversion. Connected with this, the series also exposes ideas about private and public space, physical and psychological. The question of the encroachment of the state on individual rights and voice is relevant in Vietnam as elsewhere and Tan’s box series, in its lidded-case form, if not overtly political, manifestly toys with notions of control, boundaries, and by opposition, freedom. Its content too reinforces these ideas, small cardboard sculptures of insects and masks made by Tan from discarded cigarette and film boxes, icons that here speak of entrapment or altered identity. ❞
Iola Lenzi, “The Roving Eye. Southeast Asian Arts: Plural Views on Self, Culture and Nation”, catalogue of the exhibition “The Roving Eye. Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia”, ARTER, Istanbul, Turkey, 2014, p. 45

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Suicases Of A Pilgrim