If You Havent Seen the City Through the Eyes of Art
W hen Xeo Chu was four, he had a figurative menses. "Ears are very difficult to do," the xiv-year-onetime Vietnamese art prodigy tells me at his kickoff solo exhibition in London, as we examine his commencement painting, a portrait of his mother.
Nguyen Thi Thu Suong is a plumbing fixtures first subject for the creative person. She owns 2 galleries in Ho Chi Minh City and encouraged Xeo and his two brothers to take drawing lessons not long later they could walk.
"Without mum, of class, I would be, like, nothing. I certainly wouldn't be here talking to y'all." He bows sweetly and takes my hands. "Not that that's a bad thing."
The story his mum tells me is that Xeo Chu would beg to be immune to attend art classes with his older brothers. So she gave him a pencil and an eraser and let him attend lessons after schoolhouse. His brothers gave up the lessons, but Xeo Chu had found his passion. "I love painting. Even if I am sometimes lone when I paint it fills me with joy. I disappear for hours while I am painting."
If, to my optics, there is nothing outstanding about that outset portrait – the charmingly oversized ears and even the maternal smile the lilliputian male child fondly gave his subject field would exist unexceptional, if delightful, if you saw them gracing a nursery school wall – Xeo Chu'southward artistic development in the decade since is extraordinary, at to the lowest degree judged in terms of sales and column inches. He sold his start pic to a visitor to his mum's gallery. "I was actually happy. That was when I was like half dozen." Since and then his work has been nerveless all over the world from the US to Nippon and beyond. Today critics regularly compare him with Jackson Pollock, his pictures come up with $150,000 cost tags and, with this new exhibition in London's Mayfair following others in Vietnam, Singapore and New York, he has had solo shows on three continents. Non bad work for anyone, simply especially remarkable for someone built-in in 2007.
Xeo Chu is even more of a rebuke to slacker teens than this suggests. He combines the precocity of Diego Rivera (who began drawing at the historic period of three) with the great-heartedness of Marcus Rashford. When he was 10, Chu had his get-go painting exhibition in Singapore and used the $20,000 proceeds to back up heart surgery funds, the elderly living alone and street children in his urban center.
Last summer, Xeo Chu sold eight of his works every bit not-fungible tokens (NFTs) in an online auction on his Facebook pages, donating the total proceeds of the auction – VND2.9 billion (£96,000) – to a hospital to purchase medical equipment to combat Covid-19. His female parent says: "He may only exist a little boy but I am learning from him. He is teaching me what it is to be generous."
And last summer, too, he proved himself to be at the cutting-edge of art during a evidence in Ho Chi Minh City that could be visited virtually by fine art lovers around the world, thanks to a wheeled telepresence robot that enabled spectators to await closely at 30 different paintings created during the pandemic. It also allowed them to interact with Xeo Chu as he painted live.
Now is the moment that you might want to intermission off from this article to text your underachieving offspring a cross-face emoji. I inquire Xeo Chu if his brothers and schoolhouse mates become resentful of his success? "I really don't similar talking about my painting to them for merely that reason. I kind of continue it hidden from my friends."
We climb a staircase to the primary exhibition of his work, passing on the way walls hung with his earliest paintings. These are the works that caught the eye of his fine art teacher, Nguyen Hai Anh, who told Chu'south mother: "This is the kickoff fourth dimension I saw a four-year-quondam child draw similar that. Palm lines wing, firm like a true artist." 1 of them is a landscape he painted anile v as he sat on a terrace overlooking the urban center's Commune 4 culvert. There are other paintings of dogs, a trellis of biting melon, sunshine slanting through the doorway – and lots of flowers. "I love flowers," says Thu Suong, "and it makes me very happy when he paints them."
1 day, she received a boutonniere of peonies. She tells me that she loved them so much she stayed home for three days to look at them. Xeo Chu noticed her hugging the vase. "I drew three colour pictures to prevent my mother from wilting any more," the boy told i interviewer.
Every bit he developed, Xeo Chu (which means "little pig" – his real name is Pho Van An) took photographs of what he saw on trips to the countryside and fabricated paintings of them at dwelling. "I love nature. That is what I find beautiful. I desire to depict and paint what I see."
This, I suggest, makes the comparison with Jackson Pollock seem misplaced. The abstract expressionist, after all, didn't paint what he saw – at to the lowest degree not in the manner that you lot do. "Oh Jackson Pollock!" laughs Xeo Chu, feigning exasperation. "Everybody says I'k similar him, simply I'm not so sure."
We're continuing before one of the colourful abstract paintings from his more mature, non-figurative period that induced New York gallerist George Bergès, who put on Chu's offset American show, to compare his piece of work to Pollock'due south: "Xeo Chu is creating like works from the very beginning of his career."
Bergès argues that Chu'southward 300-plus painting oeuvre taps into the collective unconscious in a way older artists struggle to manage. "To me it was very interesting to work with an artist who'due south before puberty, considering it challenged my notions nearly art and how life feel has to go into it. If there is depth and complexity in a slice of work from someone who has very limited life feel, it gives yous a glimpse of the universal unconscious that we all have and can tap into."
Perhaps: or perhaps the perspective of ane of his collectors, Karlene Davis, New Zealand delegate general in Vietnam is nearer the marker. "I love the manner Chu shows light and colour. He sees more than the naked eye and shows the spirit of the motion-picture show. They are so delicate."
Show me, I ask Chu, your favourite painting. He takes me to a work hanging over a fireplace, a sunburst of a sunset. "I had been indoors for so long because of the pandemic and then finally we went to the country so this showed how I was feeling to be dorsum in nature again." His best paintings, I think, are landscapes, such as his serial depicting northern Vietnam's Mu Cang Chai terraced rice fields ("The wave of xanthous [in the rice fields] when the harvest season comes is incredible," he says of his 2019 canvas Oct, Autumn in Canada). His biggest slice so far, Ha Long Bay in Cave, which measures 200cm ten 480cm, took three months to paint.
Has your work evolved? "It definitely has. When I started I saw mainly flowers and then I painted them. Then I started to travel so I painted some of the actually unique landscapes of Vietnam. Nosotros get to Canada sometimes." Will you paint what you encounter in London? "I promise to accept time."
Chu is hardly the first artistic kid prodigy. In 2013, Kieron Williamson a 10-year-old from Norfolk dubbed the "Mini Monet", saw his lifetime earnings soar to £1.5m after 23 of his works sold for £250,000 in under xx minutes. When Romanaian-American artist Alexandra Nechita, dubbed "Petite Picasso" for her cubist works, was 11 in 1996 her works sold in the $100,000 range.
Just when collectors put pieces by these artists on the secondary market, they do not necessarily fare well, according to art appraiser Barden Prisant. Writing in Forbes mag, Prisant establish that the peak recent auction he could observe for a Nechita was only $20,000. "Revealingly, and disquietingly, that very same piece had sold in 1998 for $92,000." Prisant found that 2 of Williamson's works auctioned recently did not sell. Mayhap Xeo Chu'due south celebrity and bankability will be similarly brief.
None of this matters to Xeo Chu. "I don't really know what prodigy means. And I don't really care. That'due south non why I pigment." His teacher rightly points out that his student is non bound by any school or dominion, and and so his work has a youthful freshness. "He always allow me exist gratis to choose what I want to draw and pigment," laughs Xeo Chu. "Sometimes he will say 'that would look amend done like this' just they're but suggestions."
The worry is that the youthful freshness will dissipate as Xeo Chu grows up and gets seized, as surely all adult artists are, by the anxiety of influence. Bergès says his client needs to be protected from as well much press, which I suspect is right: too much exposure that could brand Xeo Chu reflect on things that are irrelevant to making art. The exhibition in London is a retrospective of his first 10 years as an artist. Can yous imagine what another exhibition in x years would wait like? "Who knows if I will still be painting," he replies.
Xeo Chu tells me he doesn't know much art, but he wants to acquire. When I tell him that in the gallery next door to his exhibition is a evidence of piece of work by the late Swedish mystical artist Hilma af Klint, Xeo Chu looks fascinated to learn that someone was instructed by spirits to paint her canvases. His mum tells me that they are spending time in London with a view to her son studying art hither. Yous could become the next Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst, I tell him. "Well maybe," he says, uncertain. "But I'g not actually sure what I want to be when I abound up. I'm just a kid."
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Xeo Chu: Big World Seen from Little Optics is at D Contemporary, London until Friday.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/06/14-year-old-art-sensation-xeo-chu-i-kind-of-keep-it-hidden-from-friends
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