Monoprints, hand-colored with ink, acrylic, and correction pen, on photocopied ink templates on paper.

Description

At the turn of millennium Vũ Dân Tân made a series of different currency bills including Thai baht, Chinese yuan,Russian ruble, Italian lire, French franc, German mark, Spanish peso. Most of the bills contain specific details of the country of origin, such as architectural references, national symbols or inscriptions in related languages. The pathetic focus of the series is a self-portrait of the artist transformed according to the various national stylistics of male image. National, political, social context here is not just an accidental effect: drawing mysterious, joyful, ironic artistic bills Tan clearly manifests his mission to destroy banalities in human perception of money.

Twelve drawings from this series he combines in a humoristic calendar which he calls "El calendario por los millionarios" - "A calendar for millionaires" or "A calendar for all times". The calendar demonstrates Tan's typical play with words; his liking for displacing the accents: the familiar phrase "Time is money" here appears as "Money is time" and the artist's favorite patriotic slogan "Patria o muerte" is sarcastically transformed to prosaic "millionario o muerte" ("millionaires or death"). Word play with the habitual vocabulary for calendar and money continues on each month's page accentuating acoustic resemblances in the names of months -and currencies: Yenruary = January, Franc-bruary = February, Mark = march, Juan = June, Doll-cember = December and so on. In the "Calendar for millionaires" as in his other series, Vũ Dân Tân puts word and image on the same plane: his words and writings, quotations and Slogans become much more a part of his art work and add a theatrical effect to his play with the images, to a masquerade where in various reincarnations we can find an immutable unchallenged hero - Amadeus, name appropriated by the artist which alludes to Mozart and at the same time can be deciphered as "Loving God".

Text by Iola Lenzi, PhD, Historian of Contemporary Southeast Asian Art. Lenzi has conducted extensive research on the contemporary practice of Vũ Dân Tân, located in the context of contemporary art in 1990s Hanoi.