Bui Cong Khanh‘s oil paintings, lacquer experiments, works on paper, performances, installations and ceramic sculptures carry a bombastic sense of color and subject, these varied works often humorously appropriating popular consumer symbol with textual and figurative pun.
Bui Cong Khanh was born in Danang, Vietnam in 1972 and currently lives and works in Hoi An, Vietnam. After graduating from the Oil Painting Department of the University of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City, Bui quickly became aware of the power and influence of money on artistic production, highly critical of the ways in which it determined and conditioned an artist’s voice. Bui soon turned to performance as an artistic vehicle in protest of the ‘profit and loss’ relationship that he witnessed around him concerning the motivations for art making, his body becoming the canvas in which provocative ideas were written, endured or abstractly relayed through movement.
Today, his art practice continues to embrace the present conundrums of Vietnamese society and its social insecurities, consistently critical of the role money plays in determining happiness and ideas of wealth. His oil paintings, lacquer experiments, works on paper, performances, installations and ceramic sculptures appropriate popular consumer symbol with textual and figurative pun.