Manzi Art Space, a newly opened multidisciplinary gallery space adjacent to the Old Quarter in Hanoi, Vietnam, is currently hosting its first solo exhibition featuring the photography of long time American resident of Hanoi Jamie Maxtone-Graham whose series, The Desiring Garden, offers a photographic interpretation which uses the paintings of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) as a point of departure.
The images in The Desiring Garden prey on the Western perception of the exotic; a Rousseau-like play on an environment – here, the urban center of Hanoi – in which certain indigenous species of plants, some items of human utility and sources of nourishment are presented together in some arrangement alongside people with an uncertain relationship to these objects.
The garden is a manufactured one. The flowers, fruit, vegetables and animals (the flora and the fauna) purchased in open-air markets or from street vendors and placed within some small area of green space within the dense urbanity of the city. These are portraits of people who at the moment of initial encounter stepped willingly, curiously, uncertainly into the concocted environments they stopped to inquire about and then accepted to be photographed .
The physical view of the people inhabiting the frame, observed within these embellished environments, is that of an outsider; an onlooker upon the scene. –
Tram Vu, Director Manzi Art Space
The Desiring Garden
Photographs by Jamie Maxtone-Graham
Through April 30, 2013
MANZI Art Space
14 Phan Huy Ich
Hanoi, Vietnam
Open 9am – 12pm 7 days
