SAN ART opens 'Flat Lands' by Tomas Vu-Daniel on Thursday, 12 May from 6 - 8pm at Galerie Quynh. The exhibition will run through 4 June.

'The imagery is drawn from a variety of media - a personal inventory equally scavenged and appropriated: natural history catalogues, botany encyclopedias, maps, Soviet space photographs, math textbooks, astrophysical diagrams, blueprints. Arabic mosaics; Pennsylvania water towers, pattern-books, children's stories and newspaper clippings. The images are arranged according to visual syntax that is equally suggestive of dreamscapes as of satellite imagery of the cosmos'. Tomas Vu-Daniel

A new kind of order will be unleashed in the cosmological printed and collaged wonders of Tomas Vu-Daniel's first solo exhibition in Vietnam. A kaleidoscope of imagery cascades with intricate line in these carefully wrought works where ink, paper, paint and wood morphs in fantastical, explosive landscapes. Lining the walls of the gallery space, Vu-Daniel's imagined universe investigates the possibilities, images and spaces that make up contemporary narratives concerning the future state of the world. Vu-Daniel watches the globe battle out its religious and political differences and is enamored by the smaller hidden tales of the natural world in its own organic evolvement adapting and at times dying in the struggle against mankind's treatment.

Drawn to the way human science studies the natural world to further its scientific explorations, Vu-Daniel is also prompted by the power of dreaming as precursors to reality. 'Flat Lands' is a body of work with a cynical title for it also refers to the post-modern idea of the apocalypse, of the contemporary idea of purgatory as a temporary way-station for the judgment of souls. 'Flat Lands' is a fictive series of stories that unravel in an elegant blurring of color and line where paint bleeds and comic-style graphics merge in a new kind of urban flora and fauna.

'Flat Lands' is a body of work that began in 2008 and has been previously exhibited in Italy, China and at P.5.1 MOMA in New York.

Tomas Vu-Daniel is a painter and a printmaker. He is currently a LeRoy Neiman Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Colombia University, New York, USA. Vu-Daniel's award-winning work has appeared in Australia, Austria, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Morocco and across the United States. Vu-Daniel was born in Saigon and currently lives and works in New York.

San Art wishes to thank the Asian Cultural Council and Amarula for their generous support of this exhibition.