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“Christ, Buddha, and the Jigsaw” by Bùi Thanh Tâm
Introduced by Gate Gate Gallery on the artwork house Chillala Home of Artwork, Hanoi-based artist Bùi Thanh Tâm pushes his long-standing fascination with international hybridity to new conceptual heights. “Christ, Buddha and the Jigsaw,” curated by Phil Zheng Cai, companion at Eli Klein Gallery, and Richard Vine, former managing editor of Artwork in America, is each exuberant and meditative, uniting practically 50 post-pandemic works that fuse non secular iconography, folks traditions and Pop media.
Christ, Buddha, the Statue of Liberty and eyeballs orbit each other throughout work and sculptures, surrounded by fragments of Đông Hồ, Kim Hoàng and Hàng Trống woodblock motifs. These photographs, reduce into puzzle-like grids and digitally reprinted as multiples, kind a kaleidoscopic cosmology of perception and copy. The result’s an artwork of transformation—of religion into picture, of originality into iteration—reflecting how, within the digital age, even divinity circulates as content material.
Put in throughout two flooring, the exhibition guides viewers by a deliberate ascension: the primary flooring’s dense, image-saturated area of “multiples” offers manner upstairs to the “originals.” In Buddha-God within the Thoughts of Freedom No. 0 (2020), a monumental Buddha head emerges from a dense area of gold-and-black checkerboard squares, its tranquil expression repeatedly disrupted by deliberate gaps that resemble digital glitches. Beneath the Buddha’s floor, faint but unmistakable, a picture of Jesus seems. This delicate merging of two central non secular figures destabilizes the notion of singular devotion, suggesting a shared religious structure beneath seemingly disparate traditions. Surrounding the central face, Tâm overlays luxuriant blossoms, birds and serpentine kinds drawn from Đông Hồ and Hàng Trống folks imagery, making a cascading body of vivid blues and reds. These natural motifs seem to bloom over the Buddha’s visage even because the grid threatens to dismantle it. The work holds a productive pressure between serenity and rupture, proposing enlightenment not as a hard and fast splendid however as a picture repeatedly examined by historical past, hybridity and the fragmentation of religion within the digital age.
In Tâm’s cosmology, religion doesn’t disappear however moderately mutates. By permitting Buddha and Christ to coexist with pop icons and digital glitches, he reframes salvation itself as an act of composition, one puzzle piece at a time.
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