Craig Thomas Gallery is pleased to present The Scar, a solo exhibition by Hue-based artist Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai. The exhibition is sponsored by the Cultural Development and Exchange Fund (Denmark).

Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai’s installation The Scar explores the cycle of life and death, the impermanence of being and the memory of trauma and experience. Through her work, Mai communicates the deepest of emotions resulting from the scars that mark one’s life, both physically and metaphorically. The artist uses natural materials that can best portray the cycle of transformation and change that takes place within a human being. Memory, pain and trauma are at the center of her exploration. Mai’s ultimate aim is to dig deep into the psyche and uncover those hidden feelings and emotions that persist and linger on.

For the artist, materials have their own voice, emotion and life. The transformations they are subjected to throughout her creative process portray the transitions in a human being’s life cycle: withering and growing old, experience and life changes, reminiscence and memory, impermanence and death.

In her main body of work this time, Mai uses tomatoes as her principal material. She squeezes and squashes them into an unrecognizable mass; the pulp erupts abruptly, deforms and slowly dries up. This process can be compared to a painful and traumatic experience, where at first the pain and suffering is sudden and powerful, almost unbearable, until it slowly subsides and is eventually forgotten. From another angle, Mai’s work is centered around the experience of women. Women who go through anger, pain, fear and frustration, and yet patiently and stoically go on with their lives. Women are symbolized throughout her work by liquid streaking the wall and by the wetness and stickiness of the materials.

Time is a crucial aspect of Mai’s work, as it allows the wounds to heal. Although the physical marks will heal to a certain extent, sometimes disappearing altogether, the actual scars deep within will remain in the form of memory. The use of sewing stands as a symbol for this process of self- healing, highlighting that boundary between the surface and the inner being. The sewing line is like a portal between these two realms. The predominant red color (tomatoes) is combined with the white of raw rubber, evoking the texture and layers of the flesh of human bodies. With time, the materials will decompose and deform, withering, rotting, smelling and evoking the passing of time, forgetting, regret, nostalgia and death. All these factors combined together create a work that is centered upon the injuries and pain in one’s life, and that in time are healed but are never completely forgotten. These scars remain within one’s soul; they have disappeared but they did, at a moment in time, exist.

Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai was born in Hue in 1983. She graduated in 2006 from the Hue College of Art where she is now a faculty member. She has participated in many group exhibitions in Vietnam and abroad, her most recent work being featured in Riverscape in Flux, organized in 2012 by the Goethe Institut, in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Mai is at present an artist in residence at San Art Laboratory, Ho Chi Minh City. The Scar is her first solo exhibition.