We are delighted to invite you to our new exhibition of paintings – Anthropogenic by Zoé Olsommer. Here are the details for your diary.

The exhibition runs from Saturday 23 November 2024 until Sunday 4 January 2025
Venue: Hikayat, 226 Lebuh Pantai, 10300 George Town, Penang

➽ The exhibition
The art of sơn mài, literally ‘to paint and to sand’, is a relatively young and syncretic technique, born of necessity at a time when it was difficult to obtain oil paint or watercolour in colonial era Vietnam. What was plentiful was sơn ta, the natural lacquer embedded in the resin of the deciduous tree Rhus succedanea, cultivated in Phú Thọ province. The resin was traditionally used as lacquerware to protect wooden objects such as statues and religious artefacts.

The emergence of sơn mài as a new painting technique was made possible by the meeting of a thousand-year-old Asian culture with an artistic heritage from Europe. It uses lacquer as the main ingredient, which is mixed with colour pigments and also eggshell, river shells, mother of pearl, and silver and gold powder and leaves, which are then applied to plywood boards.

Zoé Olsommer fell in love with the pure and smooth beauty of sơn mài and she has dedicated a lot of time to learning the special gestures it requires. In addition, this traditional art form also brings her to some sort of meditative space, while spending endless hours painting, sanding or polishing. When she paints, she particularly likes the feeling of being able to stay away from screens and to work manually with all these natural materials.
Zoé may have an acute idea in her head of the kind of piece she wants to achieve, but in the end it is the lacquer that decides how it will look. She learned in this way to stay humble and she has developed a great sense of respect for the power of Nature through her work with lacquer.

Zoé’s approach to this art form is not ‘traditional’ at all, as she does not rely on the iconographic patterns used in the Vietnamese artistic tradition. As an outsider, she allows herself to take a different path away from subject matter traditionally depicted and from the technique too. She has broken free from the idea of having to sand off every applied layer to make the image flat. She likes to experiment, try new things and play with the material. It has led her to incorporate three-dimensional objects in her latest pieces that she covers with lacquer.

In other words, Zoé is trying to use sơn mài in a new and unexpected way, both visually and thematically, to express urgent contemporary issues that matter to her. In her view, art has this ability to provoke, to hold a message, and to question our relationship to the world and how we want to evolve in it.
Zoé takes a lot of joy in observing the world around her from which she draws her inspiration. She is especially sensitive to the intrinsic beauty of vernacular objects she encounters that are often left behind and that nobody seems to notice. She tries to give them back some of their glow thanks to her attention and through the beauty of the lacquer, while making them the subject of her artworks to express her ideas in a conceptual way.

In Anthropogenic, the main character is undoubtedly the human being, but in an elliptical way, as figures never appear physically in any of the artworks. But their traces are present everywhere, as they are responsible for the issues she addresses here. Zoé was first struck, while living in Vietnam, by the unrestrained ‘development’ that involves demolishing old houses to make space for the new. This was the impulse that got her started with the series Work in Progress, evolving around construction sites. It is very clear that this topic is no less a concern in Penang and in so many other parts of the world.

In this exhibition, Zoé is also addressing other pressing issues, such as plastic waste in Footprint, depicting a lost flip-flop on a beach, perhaps washed up by the sea. This allows her to question the impact of our carbon footprint connected intimately with our uninhibited consumer lifestyle. Elegy for the Sea denounces water pollution and the enormous amount of waste that overwhelms the oceans and represents a threat to the creatures that inhabit them. It is her first attempt to up-cycle objects found on the beach after a storm and to incorporate them into her artwork. Hazy Days addresses air pollution, with its main symbol supposedly protecting us from ailments emanating from the outside world – the disposable mask, an accessory that has become totally mundane and made beautiful through the natural shine of the sơn mài.

In all her pieces, Zoé wishes to enhance and play with the contrast between the serious topics that she depicts and the smooth beauty of the polished surface and the nobility of the materials used to create her artworks.

➽ Zoé Olsommer
Zoé Olsommer grew up in an artistic and art dealer’s family in Switzerland. This inspiring environment, full of museum explorations, exhibition openings and visits to artists’ studios, led her to first study art history and archaeology at École du Louvre in Paris and later ethnology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

Zoé’s heart always balanced between pursuing an academic education and finding a way to express herself more personally and artistically. She eventually decided to devote herself to art, first through the medium of photography. She graduated from the Vevey School of Photography, Switzerland, and participated in several group exhibitions and projections at the Images Festival in Vevey and the Elysée Museum in Lausanne.

Zoé lived in Vietnam for a total of nine years, in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hội An. It was there that she discovered the refined art of lacquer painting, sơn mài. It is a time-consuming practice. Every layer of lacquer has to dry before applying the next. The natural beauty of lacquer – enhanced by the use of coloured pigments, eggshell, silver and golden leaves, and other materials – reveals all its luminosity and depth once sanded and polished. The sanding process provides Zoé with the same kind of excitement as slowly discovering an emerging image in the darkroom. She studied this demanding sơn mài art form with Saeko Ando, a Japanese artist who has made Vietnam her home and shared some of her secrets.

When she relocated to Penang in 2019, Zoé brought with her all the materials she could in order to pursue her passion for sơn mài, even though the tropical climate of Malaysia is not best suited to it.

Zoé has exhibited her sơn mài artworks during Open Studios Penang in 2022 at Black Kettle and at COEX. This is her first solo exhibition.

Paintings will be on sale.

Hikayat
226 Lebuh Pantai
George Town
10300 Penang

T: 04 261 9001 (Hikayat)
04 261 8001 (Gerakbudaya Bookshop @ Hikayat)
E: info@hikayat.asia