Artist Nguyen My Ngoc talks about her work on display at Emergency Room in Hanoi Wednesday.

A unique art exhibition aims to sound warning bells on looming emergencies.

The exhibition opened in the capital on Wednesday as part of a cultural program through November 20 to mark the first Danish royal visit to the country November 1 to 9.

Sixteen Vietnamese artists and their Danish counterparts are participating in the unusual show in which they must create work based on emergencies they are thinking about that day by 12:30 p.m., when the whole exhibit gets replaced daily.

Artist Nguyen My Ngoc, a teaching faculty member at Hanoi University of Fine Arts, exhibited one of Emergency Room’s first works on Wednesday. The image shows a gun barrel reflected in the eyes of a child superimposed in the pupil.

“I want to say that child abuse and violence is something we should all be concerned about,” Ngoc said.

Other works on show dealt with A(H1N1) flu, immigration and poverty in the city. One striking a model display showed a microwave with the earth inside it.

French-Danish format artist Thomas Geoffroy developed the idea of Emergency Room in 2006 and the exhibition has toured Berlin, Athens, Copenhagen and New York.

Geoffroy said the main purpose was to give artists a flexible forum in which they might reflect problems in the society and issues that they feel passionate about.

He said he considered artists the thermometers of the dysfunctions of society.

Before each artist finished his or her work each day, they must take a 30-second run with Geoffroy, during which they discuss the emergency on their mind that day.

“Running here is the metaphor,” Geoffroy said at the exhibition’s opening ceremony. “They only come, run and sweat if they feel there’s an emergency.”

Mai Thu Van, a Vietnamese curator and one of the participating artists, said the goal was not about creating a perfect piece of artwork.

“It’s about using your conception of art to reflect life in some way that the audiences can identify with,” she said. “If there’s something we really want to convey, time is not a problem.”

International street festival

For artist Dao Anh Khanh, street art is not about showcasing the talent of the performance artists, it’s about reflecting the daily lives and culture of the people in that particular place.

Known as one of Vietnam’s most prominent performance artists, Khanh is setting up his upcoming installation titled “Convergence of Light,” a three-day exhibition of light performance art made by 20 contemporary Hanoi and international artists opening on October 30.

Khanh’s will then join 150 other Vietnamese and Danish artists in what is being considered the first-ever street art festival in the capital beginning November 3.

Festival director Tri Minh said the area around Hoan Kiem Lake and Ly Thai To garden in downtown Hanoi would be divided into five performance areas and one main stage. Certain areas will be sectioned off for seminars in which the artists will teach the audiences their crafts. In other areas, audience members will be encouraged to take the stage with performers.

Street festivals are uncommon in Vietnam, said Quyen Van Minh, founder of the Hanoi Jazz Club and one of the artists participating in the event.

Minh said the festival was a great way for him to bring his own style of jazz, a mixture of Vietnamese traditional themes and western jazz, to the public as not many people were familiar with his music.

Other events in the program include photography exhibitions at Hanoi Future Art in Tay Ho District and other rock, hip hop and jazz concerts throughout the week.

Reported by Huong Le