“As a child, I was haunted by dreams that wove through my feverish chills, drawing me into a three-dimensional space where my doussie wood bed stretched long and wide, with a green-and-red rush mat resembling a field of colorful crops. There I lay, exposed and alone on the ‘bed field,’ my eyes wide open, my body curled tight, squinting at a shadowy figure gliding by, shifting and transforming its shape like dark clouds. Terror gripped me as my body grew limp and swayed upon the bed, which kept deforming beneath me.

Until I grew up…”

Within these recurring dreams of an exhausted body, an awareness - and then an anatomy - took shape. This anatomy, aside from acknowledging abstract meanings assigned to the body, dissects the flesh to examine the blood and innards that once connected us to the body of our mother. Result? Pain? Disgust when confronted with an alienated endoscopy, compared to our imagination of the self? Waiting for death? Acceptance.

The artist Bui Cong Khanh and Sàn Art gladly invite you all to enter the space of ‘An Anatomy of Sadness’ to conduct a dissection of our bodies and contemplate these questions.

About the artist

Bui Cong Khanh graduated from the Oil painting department at the University of Fine Arts HCMC in 1998. From his undergraduate years, he expressed a keen interest in experimenting with new techniques and art forms. Since 2000, he has started practicing performance art and thus established himself as one of the leading performance artists in Saigon, alongside Ly Hoang Ly and others. During this time, he also created installation and video art that conceptually engage with social phenomena and negative aspects of development projects which forcefully displaced many communities from the land they belong to.

Ten years ago, Bui Cong Khanh decided to return to his hometown of Hoi An where he reconnected with his family. This reconnection shifts his interests to personal identity, the history of his family and community, and historical gaps faced by his ancestors.