Maya Gallery and Blue Gallery present From Hanoi with Love, where three Hanoi-based professionals with a shared passion in art and music come together to celebrate their love for Hanoi through their artistic expressions. The exhibition will be held at Blue Gallery in Hanoi.
Nikos Kanellos (b. 1954, Larissa, Greece) is a writer, musician and artist. He has exhibited in Athens, Volos, Larissa, Thessaloniki, Den Haag, Barcelona, Prishtina, Bratislava and Vietnam. His paintings can be found in many private collections, including the Skyserv Melina Merkouri Business Lounge at the Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport in Athens. He is also the Ambassador of Greece in Hanoi.
Jeffrey Wandly (b. 1964, Singapore) is an architect, project management professional, musician and artist. Fondly called "building whisperer", he has exhibited in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam. He is also co-founder of Maya Gallery in Singapore.
“I love everything about a building, from conception to construction, each nut and bolt; how every part is made, I have touched every single piece of material and smelt the dirt at construction sites.” To Jeffrey Wandly, buildings are not just sterile, man-made creations; they form part of the cosmos and have their own energies and memories. Buildings want to tell Jeffrey their stories and he is open and conscious to understand and recognise a building’s call to explore it. Walking into and moving around it, Jeffrey intuitively knows what it wants to emote, in this spiritual dialogue between concrete and flesh. In “From Hanoi with Love”, he hopes to show the connection which the people of Hanoi, its visitors and residents, have with the built environment and in turn, how they contribute to an archive of memories in the iconic buildings around Hanoi.
As he paints on the floor in his studio, the stories and the relationship continues. Jeffrey is known for his distinctive style of fluid paint strokes created by pouring and swirling ink directly from the bottle. His affinity for music and nature enables him to find music in the environment, even in silence. Jeffrey listens mostly to jazz and classical music. Just like an orchestra score where the notes and lines all connect to form a composition, his paintings dance with their own frequency and energy, not unlike sound waves. Jeffrey likes the connection of painting on the floor. This connection with the ground is the feeling of rootedness and being one with Mother Nature. “When I work it’s a spontaneity where I let gravity and a natural order flow.” Jeffrey prefers to let the medium take an organic, natural life of its own. When he paints, he is one with the medium, building structure and canvas. He does not merely recollect a past memory; he travels back and continues the conversation with the building as if he was actually physically present again. (Pamela Ng, for Building Whisperer)
William Badger (b. 1972, USA) is a marketing professional, and an artist. He has lived and worked in Vietnam for 20 years. His work incorporates his memories of Hanoi and its environs lodged in his sub-conscience, as he seeks to plume this inner world, weaving thoughts and details into life. As such, his paintings are a way of preserving and recording architectural details and nuances of Hanoi and its atmosphere which, day by day, are being lost. In his recent works, he seeks to deconstruct these images and reassemble the pieces into a collage-like, neo-cubist forms. As a musician and active member of the vibrant Hanoi music scene, he sees references to the musical world linking to the architectural.
Music performances by
Tri Minh
Paolo Chiabrando
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