Garden of Desire

This series is showing an imaginary garden, set in a destructed house. At the beginning, different types of vases in wood are placed and suddenly a vase falls down and it has a crack. This crack opens a strange sensation. This event reminds what happened to the poet André Breton when he found a “slipper spoon”. He got then the sense of déjà-vu by meeting this object which he called “Dream object”. That object was analyzed later as an artifact from his dreams. Sculptures are present in gardens as usually as decorations to evoke the Antiquity. This garden is also about an imaginary encounter between Western and Asian cultures: the temptation of Siddhārtha Buddha by the Goddess of Beauty. As the principle of Buddhism, the Middle Way should be followed between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification. Psychoanalysis talks about dreams of composite objects, as interobjects. It is a phenomenon of dreams, in which there is a perception of something that is between two objects. This series was such a awaken dream which conducted by the perception of the Desire. The Desire of the unknown, the opposite, the forbidden.

Buddha is said to have smiled when observing a pippal leaf, he realized that the whole universe was manifesting in it. As if there was a state of consciousness in which the subdivisions of the intellect no longer exist in reality. Something that can resemble a dreamlike dimension in which the boundaries of thoughts, objects, landscapes mix. It is also said that the real desires are those that make you smile, they are those that are not dictated by the sense of duty, by apparent rationality that is the mirror of a lack of self-confidence. True desire is a moment of rupture, of discontinuity. An attempt to decipher one's emotions. Desire is more a question than an answer since it can open up new territories of the imagination. Often these spaces have been considered prohibited, by those who control the range of choices, by those who establish the boundaries, by those who erect the walls, by those who assign the labels.

Quang Lam seems to move from these premises when staging his personal garden of desires. Everything comes from a falling vase, from a crack in perfection that allows you to glimpse the objects in a different light. We see branches of trees merging with the arms of a body. It is a colorful bloom of petals and buds that mix with the symbols of secular cultures, attacking them with a lively fantasy. The goddess of beauty, shapely and harmonious, finds herself in the impassive presence of a Buddha who observes the world with detachment. A silent dialogue where, however, it is color, the life that kicks in diversity, perhaps to triumph. 

Yet everything is impermanent, in an eternal cycle of transformation and change. Life itself, plants, symbols and the art itself that changes in the eyes and consciences of those who observe it.