Everything flows

Perhaps it is the sense of community that makes him so successful. When Michael Zink talks about his artists, you get the impression that they are family members or close friends who live just around the corner from him in Waldkirchen. People you call when you're in a bind or – even better – when you've cooked too much because everything in the garden has ripened at once and the wine tastes better when shared.

This has wider implications. Because when the gallery owner now collaborates with the Bao Gallery from Paris in the COLLABORATIONS sector at ART COLOGNE and has works by Thao Nguyen Phan and Rosilene Luduvico on display, this constellation is no coincidence either. Vietnamese curator Lê Thiên Bảo and Thao are old friends; they have known each other since their time in Ho Chi Minh City. And Michael Zink was a kind of mentor to Bảo when she started her own gallery.

The man from the Bavarian Forest was grateful for any advice when, during his student days in Regensburg, he began not only exhibiting the works of four artist friends, but also opening up collector circles. It was a disaster in the first few months, says Zink. But then ambition took hold and he turned things around. And perhaps it was no bad thing that he came from a completely different background, having studied chemistry and biology. These subjects deal with substances and their laws, structures and functions – and it is a good idea to understand the connections between them.

This curiosity has remained with Zink. Even if he liked something spontaneously, he first wanted to understand it, to develop a feeling for the circumstances of its creation. This was particularly true of art from other cultures, especially from Asia, where there is intensive collaboration with colleagues in Korea and Vietnam. The fact that Zink represented Yoshitomo Nara as early as the 1990s is testament to his intuition. However, the artist, known for his angry manga girls, also persuaded Zink to travel with him to Japan.

This immersion in a foreign cosmos, this intense engagement with literature and customs, is key for Michael Zink. Thao Nguyen Phan, who deals with the forgotten history of her homeland in a very poetic way – through paintings, sculptures and videos – naturally appreciates this too. In Cologne, she has an evocative triptych on display, whose titles ‘The Flood’, ‘The Dyke’ and ‘Burning Rice Fields’ already refer to the environmental disaster resulting from an absurd yet understandable belief in progress on the part of a battered nation. And yet one cannot be sure. The vulnerability of a landscape also becomes a declaration of love in Thaos' silk paintings. Made with watercolours, of course – what else?

Everything is in flux, in the ‘Bay of Poetry’ books are still swaying on the reeds, and everything is connected, just as the ‘7 Intellectuals’ are connected by a bond of sympathy. What drifts apart moves towards each other again. In Rosilene Luduvico's watercolour-like oil and chalk paintings, it is the trees and ultimately also the people. Silent and full of melancholic longing.

The Brazilian, who has been living in Düsseldorf for what seems like an eternity, seems to intuitively pick up on Thaos' thread. Or perhaps it's the other way around, but regardless, this interplay touches and affects even the delicate application of colour. This is how memories work, slipping further and further into the unconscious and returning from time to time. This is not a ‘river of no return’; in Trương Công Tùng's video work ‘Journey of a piece of soil’, too, a wide variety of realities, from cows to motorcycles and distorted voices, overlap to ultimately tell the story of what is stored deep in the earth of Vietnam.

Layer upon layer, this earth has seen and endured everything: colonisation and liberation (which was not really liberation after all), war and a peace that burdens people with new repressions. Everything comes back to the surface eventually; you just have to wait long enough. And sometimes it is enough to let the old books speak. About the conquest of America, for example, which Colombian artist Camila Rodríguez Triana integrates into her embroidered pictures, rolled up page by page. Here, too, one could pick up the threads and spin them further.

This storytelling connects all four of them, as well as Lê Thiên Bảo and Michael Zink. There is no need for lengthy negotiations; they understand each other even across great distances. For Zink, these imaginary threads are crucial. After spending time in Munich and Berlin, he moved his gallery to the village of Seubersdorf in the Upper Palatinate, population 32, ten years ago. You don't just bump into each other there, but it works. You could also say it flows.