Mapping the Gap

Believe it or not, I find myself short on words this week.  Beauty has caught my tongue.  My days here in Hoi An have been a series of unexpected interruptions by the humble artistry of Vietnamese living.  Mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-bite, mid-pace, I find my attention snagged by a style of life that seems unique to this spread of earth.  I’ll offer images.  A lot of them.  And I’ll hope you can get a sense of what I mean by the end of the scroll (if you make it).  Here are a few thoughts to guide your viewing.

There is an elegance, a vibrancy, and an order among chaos here.  Traditional and modern.  Form and function.  Intention and surrender.  It’s a beauty that doesn’t need to be seen. There is humour and reverence, labour and play, a youthfulness in the crumbles of age.  It is a welcoming of interplay between natural elements and inanimate objects, a marriage of beauty that has grown over time.  It is disintegration that is blooming new splendor. 

It is a disregard for what one would normally find an interference of aesthetics.  There is an unseeing of ugly that is achieved by a thoughtful inclusion of purposefully artistic elements.  It’s the beer box turned planter.  It’s the fishing net turned squash trellis.  It’s the old pallets turned into a wall. It’s in the patterns of broken tiles, in the piles of coconut husks, and in the quirky café décor.  It’s in the colourful rows of fishing boats, in the luminous floating lanterns, and in the steaming-hot bowl of Pho. It’s in the strings of colourful flags reaching across alleys and in the textures of tropical leaves.  It’s in the kaleidoscope walkways of fruit markets, the bright twisted wires of fluorescent market lights, and the troops of manikins guarding the omnipresent tailor shop storefronts.  It’s in the rust, the water stains, the dripping faucet algae, and the lichens adhered to the walls.  It is in the incorporation of objects used beyond their original intention.  Everything is reused, and everything becomes more beautiful in the re-usage.  It achieves a resurrection of life more beautiful than the original assignment of an object’s purpose.  There is a sense of carrying-on in these artistic gestures that feels like the undying essence of Life itself. 

I’m bewildered by how they achieve it, this communal artistic intention.  I feel drunk when I try to articulate it, like I’m stepping into territory upon which humans are not meant to tread.  Artistry.  I’ll just call it that and hope that these photos will convey some sense of the shudders and gasps that inspired the tap on that white Photo circle of my screen.  I hope you can see it.  

Good luck. It’s a heck of a scroll.

You can see it, right? The artistry is everywhere.