The Adventure of Color Wheel

Synopsis

The project ‘The adventure of Color Wheel’ is a project creating public artwork, which is initiated and realized by Art Labor collective from July 2014 to January 2015 at Pediatrics Department, HCMC Eye Hospital, with support from Sàn Art, Lions Clubs International Foundation, Kansai Paint, Mango Art Material, Prince Claus Fund, artist Lang Do, Dat Nguyen, Duy Thong and architect Oanh Nguyen. The artwork is re-designing the whole space of Pediatrics Department, including mural paintings and drawings, signs, billboards, interiors, furniture…

Walking from the old lift of HCMC Eye Hospital, which is still preserved from colonial time, along the entrance corridor, you will see lines of rotating E letters overhead looking like abstract paintings yet they are in fact eye vision test for illiterate people. This corridor leads you to Pediatrics Department, where your eyes will be lulled to various mural paintings of thousands of colored circles on the corridors’ ceiling while brightly painterly landscapes of another imagined realm dance across each room’s walls.

From July to September 2014, Art Labor instructed weekly art classes for children patients, encouraging them to play with colors creatively. At the same time, the collective learned the children’s capacity of aesthetic perception and gained more knowledge of eye diagnoses in Ophthalmology. Combining those aspects with the artists’ imagination, the public artwork ‘The adventure of Color Wheel’ was born.

For the first time in Vietnam, a health care institution has collaborated with contemporary art practitioners. Ophthalmologists of HCMC Eye Hospital shared their medical knowledge with Art Labor members, introduced the collective to meet their children patients and opened up their therapeutic space for the collective to transform interior architecture. This interdisciplinary collaboration – among visual art, children’s natural mind and medical knowledge has resulted in a unique and friendly environment for the patients, where they receive treatment inside the embrace of artworks.