Bui Chat Exhibition | Bay Tam Nam

Artist Statement

 

A folk game my generation often played during Tết is a card game called “ngầu,” in some places known as “ngầu hầm” or “ngầu tố.” The number 785 refers to a specific combination of three cards, describing the state of “having ngầu” — meaning one is qualified to remain in the hand.

I like this game because it has no hierarchy. No one is above anyone else. There are only two kinds of people: those with ngầu and those without. Having ngầu means you still have a reason to play. Not having ngầu means leaving the table. Art is the same: there are no “high” or “low” works, no “classic” or “common.” There are only those still willing to take risks within their own limits, and those who have stopped.

I call this project Bảy Tám Năm — both the “ngầu” number in the game and the expiry date of the work. I have experimented with a special solvent: when mixed with paint, it causes the painting to gradually dissolve over time. After seven to eight years, all colour will fade, leaving only a white canvas. Not because it has been destroyed, but because it has been “programmed” to disappear.

I want the painting to die on schedule. Not because I despise the material life of objects, but because I want it to return to the natural order: birth, death, forgetting. For a long time, people have spoken of “eternal art,” “immortal beauty.” But in truth, everything exists by knowing how to disappear. A work preserved forever is only a dead object carefully embalmed. I want to do the opposite: let it die in its own way — lightly, slowly, and naturally.

If art is treated as a commodity, then it should also carry a warning label:

“Best consumed within 7–8 years from the exhibition date.”

A joke, but also a way of telling the truth. Beauty, too, should be consumed within its proper time. Paintings are like milk, wine, or the human body: past their expiry they change flavour — and that very change becomes the next part of the work.

Bảy Tám Năm is therefore a game with rules. I create beauty while also signing its sentence of self-destruction. I paint, and at the same time, I am erasing. Each layer of paint carries within it the seed of dissolution, the way the body already carries the gene of ageing. I am not doing a chemical experiment; I am simply practising a kind of painterly spirituality. To paint in order to lose is my way of letting go of the artist’s illusion of immortality.

When the painting fades, what remains is not an object, but memory. I want to test this: do viewers remember what they once saw, or does memory also dissolve with the colour? Perhaps what remains is only a vague feeling that “a painting once existed here.” And perhaps it is precisely the moment when there is nothing left to see that art truly appears.

In this project, each painting is a countdown clock. Each look from the viewer is a tick of the hand. When you stand before it, you are looking at a process of disappearance, not a state of presence. I want viewers to feel what is slipping away, not what is still there.

I know that when it comes to art, everyone wants to keep it. People restore, archive, insure, and enshrine it in museums. But for me, it is precisely temporariness that is art’s value. A work, like a human life, does not need to extend indefinitely. It only needs to live its moment fully. Death does not weaken it; on the contrary, it grants another quality — the quality of a disappearance undertaken with awareness.

If I could, I would attach a small label to each painting:

“Warning: This work will self-destruct within 7–8 years. No responsibility if you love it for too long.”

That is not mere satire. It is an attitude. A way of saying that the artist, like the work, must know they live within a time limit. When we dare to look at brevity, what remains is not fear, but a kind of freedom.

Bảy Tám Năm — that number, in gambling is an opportunity; in art, a deadline; and in life, a test of courage. Art does not need to last forever to have value. It only needs to have ngầu: meaning to dare to play, dare to lose, dare to end up empty-handed.

And when the last painting disappears, leaving a white canvas, perhaps that is not an ending, but the moment a different mode of existence begins: existing in memory, in forgetting, in the gaze that has already passed.

Because in the end, as in every hand of cards,

only what is about to be lost truly exists.

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Noted: In the gambling card games “ngầu hầm” or “ngầu tố,” 785 (7+8+5=20, a multiple of ten) means “having ngầu.” That is, the player qualifies to stay at the table, to continue contesting the win. Each player is dealt five cards; those who have ngầu “show” and keep two cards to fight with. Those without ngầu fold their cards, as if already dead. The remaining players may “raise,” “call,” or turn over the final two cards. Whoever is afraid quits. Whoever believes plays it through. The outcome is decided in only a few seconds, but everything depends on one thing: the nerve to wager.