Nicole Tran Ba Vang begins in the world of fashion: designer since 1987, she never ceases to follow the defiles and the press that it echoes. Her photographs show the bodies of supermodels in the perfect plastic, as is the case on the catwalk. She has titled his latest exhibition “Spring-Summer” and “Spring-Winter,” and poses the problem in his work clothes as a reflection of fashion, stressing the importance of appearance in society. She herself says: “To be or not forthcoming. My work is defined by the pun. “
Nicole Tran Ba Vang’s reflections concerns primarily the garment and body in their social function, especially as presented in the media: a paradoxical body, both bare and coated with a second skin acting as a garment .
A perfect body as required by media representations, but a tortured body, wearing safety pins and zippers that evoke a clinical or cosmetic surgery. These photographs extremely smooth, aesthetically pleasing, yet make reference to the subjective experience of the body, that of a body need to show off but also modestly hide, even under a second skin, and that it is prepared to suffer to help make it disappear. Nicole Tran Ba Vang questionned the body, creating unease in the viewer.
Technically perfect photographs of Nicole Tran Ba Vang sow confusion in our minds, in the sense that beyond the social role of the body, it questions the very notion of otherness: the body would be a boundary between self and other it would be a screen. But this screen seems transparent in these clothes made of skin …
The dialogue between art and fashion
This back and forth between art and fashion, perfectly illustrated the work of Nicole Tran Ba Vang, is an important phenomenon today.
There is first of all the artists who illustrated advertisements for clothing brands such as Jean-Pierre Khazem, those doing fashion photography for magazines such as Ines Van Lamsweerde and Mario Testino.
And magazines using great fashion photographers to illustrate the increase: there is The Face, Dutch in Wallpaper, Dazed and Confused, iD, and France, we have Purple, Self Service or Crash. They are also found in the press purely feminine, especially with number and jealous …
This dialogue may seem alarming to the eyes of some art critics, however, has the merit of the public about some photographers that would previously have remained completely anonymous behind the advertising magazines.
Finally, this phenomenon is a reflection of a broader movement in contemporary art, that of a willingness on the part of artists to use new modes of expression, outside the field of art. And in the case of Nicole Tran Ba Vang.
The body mutant
The question of the body is also a topic extensively covered by contemporary artists on the mode of a body would be transformed by technological developments such as cosmetic surgery, transplants, cloning. The body becomes mutant (the title of an exhibition which featured among others Nicole Tran Ba Vang to Gallery Enrico Navarra), “posthuman” monstrous and disturbing.
This is one of the problems Nicole Tran Ba Vang showing us the body as it may be in the future from a body prosthetics technology of the digital image, totally disembodied. The virtual capacity of our time portray the body dematerialized as Lara Croft and others, and the artists it is a natural echo.
Florence Horse
September 2001
