KAN ART BKK
Kunstart: Zeichnung
Technik: Tusche
Stil: Moderne
Vita / Lebenslauf:
The Phenomenon of KAN
There are artists who consciously “create art” – and you can feel them working hard to do so – and there are those who effortlessly let patterns speak through them.
KAN is one of those. At first glance, a KAN drawing may look like no more than cuteness: a sketch of long-legged girls sporting whimsical shoes and handbags, or a doodle-like spiral of faces and flowing hair. Only when you start to look closely at his drawings do you begin to see surprising richness of imagery and complexity of design. This is why so many have felt the peculiar appeal of KAN’s work.
The complexity is so elaborate, and yet harmonic, that at times it has a miraculous quality. “Sometimes, after I finish a drawing,” KAN says, “I wonder, ‘Did I do that?’”
A private artist, KAN has allowed few to witness him at work. If they had, they would see that when he sits down to draw – in indelible black ink on white paper – he doesn’t prepare a preliminary draft, he doesn’t erase or re-draw. Somehow an endlessly varied fantasy world, interlinked by theme and line, emerges intact from his moving pen. Thousands of intricate drawings, each one different. That’s the phenomenon of KAN.
KAN stands for Khoa Anh Nguyen, born in 1982 in a small town 200 kilometers southwest of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In 1998, he moved to Ho Chi Minh City and began his study of art, graduating in 2004 from College of Culture and Arts. In 2006, he moved to Bangkok, and started drawing the sketches for which he is now known. Since 2010, he has been based at Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC).
KAN’s inspiration is fashion. He says, “I love fabric and also fashion (for men or women, anybody...). When I was a child, my mother took me to the market with her. I followed her to the fabric shops where they have a lot of colors and patterns, they were very beautiful and so lovely. The feel of them when I held them in my hands made me know what beauty was. I felt excited when I saw the weight, the pattern.”
“I have drawn all my life, everywhere I have lived, but my best pictures are since I left Vietnam and came to Thailand. I draw every day. I can see the images from Elle, Vogue, and Bazaar everywhere in Bangkok. I get inspiration from fashion and magazines, which I combine with the skills I learned in college. Now I make drawings that combine fashion, fabrics and the natural beauty of flowers into patterns on the paper.”
KAN studies fashion obsessively, scouring magazines and the internet for new ideas. Among his special passions are Marc Jacobs’ collections at Louis Vuitton, and Belgian designer Dries Van Noten. “Dries Van Noten has been my main inspiration for the last ten years,” he declares.
However, fashion, in the hands of KAN, does not look like the pages of Elle or Vogue as we usually see them. His Twiggy-like models are a pastiche of fashion, reinventing Louis Vuitton and Prada in a retro universe of 1920’s Erté illustrations, or 1890’s Art Nouveau. He takes fashion away from the runway and into “KAN’s world,” a place where all the girls have endless legs and pursed Betty Boop lips, where certain themes keep re-appearing, especially the high-heeled shoes, but also fish, rabbits, hearts, flowers, dangling ropes and cords, handbags, bobbed hairdos, cloche hats, and the wavy lines of hanging fabric or loops of hair. These themes intermingle – look closely you’ll see a face suddenly appear amid the swirls. Or what first seems to be a coiffured braid hanging down behind a woman’s head reveals itself as a man’s body draped over her outline.
Specialists use terms like “Decorative,” “Conceptual,” “Abstract,” “Minimalist,” “Traditionalist,” and so forth to define and critique the work of contemporary artists. But KAN’s art takes itself too lightly for any of these categories to apply. His art is a bubble, a puzzle, an upwelling of creative ideas that come from nowhere, expressing themselves in complex patterns.
The themes of KAN’s work are almost always cheerful. Sorrow, cruelty, and harsh social realities have no place in his drawings. They may seem as fluffy as a fashion sketch and as silly as Hello Kitty. In fact, one of his curious twists is that while Hello Kitty has eyes but no mouth, his flapper girls have luscious mouths but no eyes.
Within innocence lurks also perversity, even deviance. We catch notes of Aubrey Beardsley-style fin-de-siècle decadence, Indian erotic miniatures, even a hint of Tom of Finland. In a setting of fluttering silks and a long-eyelashed deer, a pair of enigmatic dark sunglasses dominates. Pretty or perverse, the subjects of KAN’s paintings, whether a girl posing daintily with a lion mask, mustachioed men, fish, or rabbits, might not be the main point. The unexpected turn of his imaginative pen – the abstract pleasure of lines, dots, and dashes – transcends all his themes.
As KAN collectors know, his work is addictive. Each drawing elicits a fresh response of humor, joy and surprise. Yet it’s hard to define where the addiction lies, because his means are so plain. KAN simply picks up his pen, thinks to himself “Playing cards,” or “Three girls,” or “Japanese boys,” and then, from a white page, there emerges an interlace of black lines and red dots. That’s all.
by Alex Kerr
Author of “Bangkok Found”
www.alex-kerr.com
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