A visitor sits by Nguyen Phuong Linh’s favorite piece at her exhibition, Hoa (flower)

An exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City honors the nation’s hardest workers.

As more evidence of her native talent, Linh scored a one-year scholarship in 2006 to study sculpture and painting in Italy, where the Borsa di Studio of the Accademia Albertina delle Belle Arti put her artistic creations on public display several times.

Now aged 24, she has come back to Vietnam and is staging a solo exhibition at Quynh Gallery with sponsorship from the Danish Embassy in Hanoi.

Lasting until September 5, “Salt” features a sculpture made from four tons of salt, an enormous flower made of 700 pieces of clothing, a heap of photographs and a documentary film about salt farmers.

“Vietnamese salt is crude, big, wet, flavored with the smell of wind, sunlight and sea, and still stained with the yellow-brown color of soil,” says Linh with a hint of passion in her voice.

“It’s not farmed with advanced technology like in other countries, but by people using their hands alone.

“It was the salt that grabbed my attention when I first visited Hai Thinh (in Thanh Hoa on the central coast) last August,” Linh explains.

It was a moment of inspiration.

Fruition took much longer. Linh spent more than a year working on her ideas and traveling from north to south.

Whenever the salt farmers went about their work, she would follow them down to the pans, be it in the cool of the early morning or the blazing heat of the midday sun.

Speaking of her favorite piece, Hoa (flower), Linh says she spent several months manually stitching the old clothes she had requested from salt farmers, rice growers, farm hands and other laborers to create a big flower.

“What I’ve done is collect people’s sweat,” she says.

“It’s made me realize something. Salt farmers’ clothes are different from other workers’ in that they wear out quickly because of the accumulated seawater and perspiration.

“By displaying this work, I am saving and paying homage to honest sweat. Where would we be without it?”

Quynh Gallery is located at 65 De Tham Street, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City.

Source: Tuoi Tre, Tien Phong