Haïku n°13 Winter Liên Hoàng-Xuân

“Used to high pressure and low light
I married patience
And the eyes don't know
whether to look at the road or the clock”

Begun in 2021, this quadriptych of Liên Hoàng-Xuân's Four Seasons was created between Beirut and Paris. Made up of painted and gilded woodcuts, this series is inspired by the literary traditions of Romantic poetry, such as Nizami's Majnun and Layla corpus of Arabic and Persian poems, and Hafez's Divan. The artist is also inspired by the modern elegies of Mahmoud Darwich and Jean Genet.

The first two works in this quadriptych, Autumn and Winter, follow a car mishandled by the elements. The accompanying texts are marked by the pressure and impatience felt in these hostile landscapes.

In Spring, the estranged lovers are reunited, and this time the text takes the form of a promise for the future of these two characters. In Summer, the car returns to its original solitude, but life has appeared within it in the form of a fig and gingko biloba tree.

On these wooden surfaces, the artist engraves her personal symbolic world, combining elements drawn from the traditional iconographic repertoires of South-West Asia and the Arab world, with components of an industrial universe.

Liên Hoàng-Xuân uses war stories, apocalyptic myths and conspiracy theories, which accompany these haikus with their more romantic speech. Through these repetitions, the artist plays with the sentimental and personal destinies of individuals, intertwined with the invisible power of broader historical dynamics that ultimately overtake and destroy them.