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Black Gallery - Vink's Travels

Vink's Travels

An exceptional donation to the Museum of Fine Arts


 

Brouillard pourpre, Les Tourbillons de fleurs blanches, Poussière d’or, La Montagne qui bouge, Un matin pour tout horizon… These few titles - among many others - make up a vibrant and colourful poetic symphony: the one that the Liège-based cartoonist Vink led from the mid-1980s until the 2010s.

It is essentially through two series, Le Moine fou (ten albums, from 1984 to 1999), and its continuation, Les voyages de He Pao (five albums, from 2000 to 2010, all published by Dargaud) that Vink became known to a wide audience. He Pao is the main heroine: a Westerner, a "barbarian" in feudal China, who is led on an initiatory and personal quest through many twists and turns.

Born in 1950 in Da Nang, Viet Nam, Vink - Vinh Khoa is his real name - fled the war that was ravaging his country and in 1969 settled in the Cité Ardente. After studying educational sciences at the University of Liège, then illustration at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he produced his first album in 1979, based on a script by Michel Dusart. It is fully in line with the history of our region: Pays de Liège, vie d'une église, retraces the thousand years of existence of the Principality of Liège.

Vink's professional career began in earnest in 1979 in the columns of the newspaper 'Tintin', and then, in 1983, in the magazine 'Charlie Mensuel', which published the first episodes of 'Le Moine Fou'. These are breathtaking realist stories set in ancient China, in which the cartoonist and scriptwriter gives free rein to his masterly talent for storytelling.

His plates unfold with great energy in scenes that are often tormented, whether they are of combat or daily life, but also mountain and marine landscapes, where the air of the open sea blows and the desire for contemplation. Whether it is a question of classic boxes or larger ones, with sometimes very cinematographic framing, the story is always captivating and mastered.

Vink is one of the rare comic book artists to work in direct colour, his natural way of proceeding "to express everything at once", without losing the thread. Initially using coloured inks, he very quickly switched to watercolours. His innate sense of colour and his compositions, which sometimes resemble prints, are rooted in his Asian childhood.

The presence of a female heroine, as expert in martial arts as the men, is rare in the Franco-Belgian comics of the early 1980s. But the action and the twists and turns of Vink's scripts are above all a pretext for expressing the artist's feelings in his daily life and for telling inner stories. The Mad Monk is thus crossed by the themes of uprooting, fear of madness, and war.

Knowing the existence of the collection of original plates by masters of the Ninth Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, the cartoonist Vink wanted a representative selection of his work to join this collection. Vink has therefore made a generous donation to the museum of 173 original plates, from his beginnings in 1979 to his last albums, i.e. almost 40 years of his career. On 25 January 2021, the Liege City Council gratefully accepted this donation to a fine arts museum, which is exceptional in the history of comics in Belgium.

The Galerie noire de La Boverie is particularly pleased to welcome some sixty plates selected from the collection, illustrating each album of the donation. For this exhibition, Vink has also lent preparatory sketches and several recent paintings from his current artistic work, devoted to portrait and landscape painting. The Museum of Fine Arts invites you to discover this artistic and personal adventure this summer.

Alain Delaunois
Scientific Attaché
La Boverie - Museum of Fine Arts

Vink's Travels - A donation
Exhibition at the Galerie noire de La Boverie

Practical information on the exhibition:
Dates: from 4 July 2022 to 16 January 2023
Schedule: Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm
Address: Parc de La Boverie 3, 4020 Liège.

Contacts :
La Boverie : 04 238 55 01 (reception) – aW5mb0BsYWJvdmVyaWUuY29t

About the exhibition :
Alain Delaunois Scientific Attaché / La Boverie - Musée des Beaux-Arts (YWxhaW4uZGVsYXVub2lzQGxpZWdlLmJl )

Press communication from La Boverie :
Laura Dombret (bGF1cmEuZG9tYnJldEBsaWVnZS5iZQ== )
Emmanuelle Sikivie (ZW1tYW51ZWxsZS5zaWtpdmllQGxpZWdlLmJl">ZW1tYW51ZWxsZS5zaWtpdmllQGxpZWdlLmJl )