A girl looking at you, looking at her—is it voyeuristic if an invitation is implied? For Ta Quynh Mai, the feminine body is branded with the politics of looking. In this attention-deficit economy, the Vietnamese artist approaches her art with a mindful eye, calling for tenderness and patience in the act of viewing. The women she paints are soft yet brooding, exposed but never self-conscious. Within the muted palette of her canvases, a portrait of the artist emerges.

Stillness pervades Ta’s work, a reflection of the artist’s own introverted personality. She demands little from the audience but rather lets the works speak for themselves. Her laid-back attitude often contrasts the angst and restlessness that simmers beneath the canvas—the women of her paintings seem haunted by a persisting sense of discontent.

Ta typically portrays her characters in an intimate solitary. Though alone, they are never lonely—her subjects find thrill in confronting the viewer, in implicating them, and in questioning their gaze. These women live for no one but themselves. They know they’re being watched but refuse to cover up their nude bodies out of shame, and no matter whatever they may be doing, they continue without interruption. Ta’s women are uncompromising in their determination of being true to themselves. Their defiant gazes, varied skin tones, and confident body language paint a clear picture—femininity isn’t unidimensional.

In Pleasure from 2021, one of Ta’s iconic blue girls cuts across her palm with a sword as she kneels nakedly on the tiled floor. In Ten of Swords, long claymores skewer another woman laying on similar tiles. The viewer is made to bear witness to these sacrificial rituals, implicating themselves in the privacy invasion of these women. Eerily enough, the impaled woman turns her head to confront the viewer. As a viewer, one is involuntarily situated within a site of a soundless massacre. Yet, they cannot take their eyes off the subject, a sadistic need to continuously decipher what she is feeling, what she is thinking, and what she is desiring.

Though it may be easy to mistake in certain paintings, Ta’s women are not hiding from the world, just merely disappointed by it. I Look For Empathy in the Wrong People from 2019 shows a girl with long, dark hair peeking out from behind a vase—no one has what she needs, yet she is still compelled to observe them.

Red Blood Spill from the same series is one of Ta’s more popular works. In it, a woman dressed in an immaculate blue ao dai is seated in a chair against a red backdrop, with half of her face enveloped by shadows. It’s not clear what she’s waiting for, but her gaze seems to carry a predatory hostility, one of complete control. The woman is much like a huntress, wielding a piercing stare that renders viewers defenseless.

The power and confidence of Ta’s women are apparent even in her titles, such as You Are Not the Sun, I Am, I Set the Moon on Fire Because She Wouldn’t Wake Up, or She Bloomed at the Dead of Night. She attributes this reverence for words to her love of poetry, an interest passed on by her grandmother. Title ideas come from tarot cards, astrology, or just Ta’s stream of thoughts, serving as artful extensions of the paintings. Through both art and poetry, Ta seeks to understand no one else but herself.

This philosophy perhaps best captures the essence of Ta’s approach towards art—if you miss it, she won’t fault you. But if you come across her works, you’re expected to offer forth a scrutinous eye. In their stillness, Ta’s women aren’t hiding but are simply uninterested in revealing their full selves to a world they’re disillusioned by. Her series You’re Not the Sun, I Am features women in minimal snippets, showing only close-ups or partially visible figures caught in thin slivers of light. Paintings such as Arch and Hair reject the audience of a full view as if stating that viewers are not entitled to their privacy and what they do out of sight.

Ta subtly subverts the viewer’s understanding of nudity through an almost playful take on the matter. In the 2019 paintings Aries Rising and Scorpio Venus, she features nude females, but the former sees the subject centered with an unobstructed view, while the latter sees the woman attempting to cover up her body with a slender floral stalk. Just because the viewer has seen these women in the nude, it does not mean they know anything else about them. In these paintings, the women’s gazes seem to question the viewer’s intentions, prodding them to reconsider their notions of nudity and the female body. Ta’s women are fully aware that their bodies are being watched. Yet, there is no trace of embarrassment. After all, it is the viewer who is implicated as an intruder.

Far from coquettish, Ta’s women are conquerors and liberators. Their nudity is presented in a completely non-sexual context; these women are engaging with their quintessential femininity with a sagacity. Ta believes that sensuality should not be mistaken for promiscuity, and sexuality should not be mistaken for consent. Whether clothed or nude, the women on her canvases are the ones in charge—their bodies belong to no one.

Ta relies on art to provide a space where she can express herself safely “without guilt.” When asked about this “guilt” that art frees her from, Ta confesses that she’s always felt uncomfortable in her self-expression, as it is often affected by outside influence. In her everyday life, Ta describes herself as a mirror, an amalgamation of different people that she meets. But in art, she’s not responsible for anyone’s thoughts and feelings but herself. Her art is not one of appeasement. “In art, I can be private, and when it’s private, I am free,” she says.

This preference for isolation does not necessarily insulate the artist or her female protagonists from the world. Rather, a part of Ta’s magic is her threading of themes across her canvases, almost so that her subjects seem to be in conversation with one another. United, these women communicate through fearless glances and through their ability to immediately disarm viewers. In their silence, the women of Ta’s art meditate on the complexities of womanhood, on what they have learned from the generations of women before them.

Me/Mothers is a series of portraits from 2018 that feels like a predecessor to Ta’s most recent works. Centered around mothers from different generations, these women are much more solemn than the characters who appear in her newer paintings. Hardly surprising when considering that the maternal figures depicted are based on real-life women who have spent their lives fighting, for their family, for their country, or even for their own life. These women embody strength, grace, and wisdom. Dressed in traditional garments, these women are implanted in our imaginations; they’re strong maternal figures who Ta grew up around. Seated, they rest with crossed legs and folded hands as their quiet stares interrogate and study the viewer. They’re stern but patient, waiting in perpetuity. In Ta’s pictorial universe, they are the mothers of the women we see in her later works. Though this new generation of women no longer dons the traditional attire of their mothers, their resilience has been passed on. Vietnamese femininity has changed over time, and Ta’s art is an attempt at connecting the diverging definitions.

In the past, Ta has said that the majority of her art is autobiographical to a certain degree. Though she never intentionally means for her subjects to be connected with one another, they inevitably are because they all represent different versions of herself. “In my art, each series is a unique experience that had happened in my private life, and I approached them all with the feelings I had at the time,” she explains. “Maybe it’s the aesthetic that makes them all interconnected, as I do have a set way I want my art to look, especially lately. But I think since it’s all coming from me, they’re all representations of my inner world; they can be seen as in constant communication with each other.”

Ta’s paintings are, ultimately, love letters to Vietnamese women. Her female protagonists confront the viewer in the shadows, employing the liminal space where darkness meets light, where divinity meets mystique. Their interiority maps the multidimensionality of Vietnamese women, women whose bodies had been the site of history for too long, scarred by the violence that colored the country for decades. The more one allows Ta’s works to absorb them, the more they see that there’s exponentially more than meets the eyes. Representing Vietnamese women by proxy, Ta’s females allude to painful histories that are testaments to their strength, shown on flawless painted bodies. Ta has wrestled with her understanding of Vietnamese femininity for a while. Her younger self believed that the quintessential Vietnamese woman—one who embraced femininity, loyalty, diligence, submission, beauty, and purity—was showing signs of weakness in her softness and tenderness. But Ta’s artistic journey has led her to realize that femininity and empowerment need not involve the antithesis of devotion and warmth. “Femininity was something that I thought I understood but didn’t truly know,” she confesses. “And it was because I didn’t really want to know myself back then. It took a lot of listening and learning and growing for me to fully embrace my femininity and what it means to me.”

Her explorations of femininity are meant to especially resonate with Vietnamese viewers. She leaves clues in her paintings that are perfectly innocuous, yet, to the privy, these references cycle through their childhood, their memories, and what they know of themselves.

Take, for example, I Am Tired of Dying, a painting inspired by a Vietnamese nursery rhyme that goes “Hai con thằn lằn con/ Đùa nhau cắn nhau đứt đuôi,” which roughly translates to ‘Two small lizards/ Playing around, they bite their tails off.”

The catchy tune refers to autotomy, a natural phenomenon where an animal casts off a part of its body when it’s caught by a predator. On Ta’s canvas, the lizard discards its tail in an attempt to escape. Whether it be the cutting of hair or the shedding of tails, Ta believes in jettisoning parts of our past selves in order to transform and reinvent.

Again and again, a slight hint of pessimism and existential dread persists in Ta’s works. Returning to Aries Rising, the woman in the composition kneels on the black-and-white tiles, the floor reminiscent of a chessboard itself. She is at a crossroads, calculating her next move, but at the same time, knows herself to be a pawn in her own game of chess. This is made abundantly clear when we see that in the white tile to her right, there are faint traces of the lizard.

This motif is even more prominent in Salamander, with the lizard appearing atop a woman’s shoulder blades. Is it crawling on the woman’s naked body, or is it a tattoo? Either way, the lizard serves as a symbol of change. Reinvention and transformation are as thrilling and stimulating as they are exhausting and harrowing. Ta’s women realize they’re on the verge of a necessary metamorphosis, but that knowledge does not ease them from the pain that comes with the transfiguration. Healing is painful, but staying stagnant is life-threatening.

A country scarred by colonization, Vietnam is a melting pot of disparate cultures. In studying Ta’s oeuvre, one sees that her embrace of contemporary art forms does not signal a compromise of traditional Vietnamese values but rather complements them. Ta is among the emerging group of Vietnamese artists eager to define a new era of Vietnamese art, an era of liberation and freedom of expression. The symbolism of the lizard’s transformative abilities is a clear homage to both Vietnam and Ta’s internal world. She knows that ecdysis is eternal.

On her canvases, Ta’s subjects shed their layers again and again, down to the last coating of their skin to discover their newest forms. Ta knows that for Vietnamese women, this evolution doesn’t discount the hard-earned lessons of earlier generations. What are our inheritances but their memories? What to make of the abandoned layers of our old selves? It is far from a burden—rather, it is a sort of built-in pain that presupposes our existence in the world. It is a paradoxical pain that Vietnamese women must honor to grow, but also one that they must move on from to survive.

In the Moonchaser series, Ta surrenders herself to the world. Through five diptychs and a standalone canvas, viewers are invited to watch a game of hide-and-seek between a woman and the moon—a reference to the human proclivity of searching for a divine power. In it, a woman buries her face in her hands, peeking out between her fingers to sneak a look. She slowly opens and closes her eyes, turning around to step into the darkness of night. She is anything but afraid. In the final frame, the woman floats in water, her nude body illuminated by the moonlit skies. Much like the female protagonist, Ta is fearlessly following her instincts and intuition, always chasing the elusive, always yearning for more.

Today, now much more mature as an artist and with a better understanding of her goals, Ta no longer feels as if she’s competing against others. Rather, she is allowing herself to “approach art in a way that’s more peaceful,” a method that allows her message to take the spotlight instead of the technique. No longer chasing an idea of how her art should be, Ta lets her art be what it is.

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Website: www.taquynhmai.com

Contributor:  Uyen Dinh
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li