Vietnam is far enough away on the other side of the planet to seem wild and alien at first glance. But Gábor Kudász Arion, a photographer who spent two months wandering through the thick of Vietnam’s cities and villages, has seen the everyday struggles, aspirations and desires of the people who live there, and what he finds is in many ways very familiar. The incompatibility of the aspirations of the different generations, the disenchantment of the young and the imperative of the elderly to stay put, creates tensions on a social scale.
It is similar to the strange mixture of a market economy embedded in a communist system and skyscrapers wedged between colonialist backdrops. The works of Gábor Kudász Arion show not only landscapes and people, but also the subtle nuances of inner anguish and desire. At the same time, his digital-analogue hybrid solutions address the current problematic of the relationship between truth and appearance. From a considerable amount of material shot in Vietnam, we present a guiding thread of the processing process that unfolds along the artist’s recollections.