The Flow

The story

A woman rides through the city. The old Saigon is to her left, today is to her right, and above her head is what is still coming. Our number sits on her shoulder.

She is a Saigon woman of now — eyes closed, at ease. She is not looking at the city. She feels it. Around her the city assembles itself out of the parts a guidebook leaves out: the motorbike current, iced coffee on a plastic stool, hand-painted signage, cables, fragments of alleys and market.

Where the collage runs out, it turns into flowing lines that move around her, the way a current softens around a stone. City and woman stay one picture.

Nguyễn Tấn Lực works as Cresk. He co-founded Wallovers, a Saigon graffiti and mural crew, and he has been painting for more than a decade — long enough that the city has changed around his walls twice over.

It did not start here. It started on a wall in Vũng Tàu, seen by a schoolboy who decided that was the thing he wanted to do. He later studied graphic design, in two schools, and chose the spray can anyway.

His subject is almost always a Vietnamese woman — not as an ornament and not as heritage, but as the person carrying the day. Among his larger works is Vietnam on the Wall, a stretch of country painted along Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh; with Wallovers he has shown in galleries as well as on streets.

What he brought to this wall was a question about time. Not the city as it is, but three cities at once: the Saigon that was, the Saigon standing outside the door, and the one still on its way. He put all three around one woman and let her ride through the middle of them with her eyes closed. She is not choosing between them. She is what stays constant while they change.

Richie draws what is disappearing. Cresk paints what is arriving. The two walls are the same city read at different speeds.

He took this wall on the condition that it stays. It does.

The wall stays with the house. It is the one thing here that is not for sale.

The two pillars at the entrance belong to the same work. Hands on the left — touch, craft, what is felt on the body. Closed eyes on the right — the other way of seeing. Flowing lines run across both toward the door.

If the wall inside is the view, the pillars are the frame.