| With ideas as fresh as the paint I could still smell as I walked in, the exhibit "Who are we?" at Lawrence S. Ting building- Phu My Hung attempts to answer this question about contemporary Vietnamese identity in such various media as painting, photography, sculpture and one (hidden) installation piece.
Since I am a student of literaturemore than of the visual arts,
as well as someone who is only
fractionally part
of |
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the "we" in the question, my contribution as a reviewer is necessarily going to be limited. I greatly appreciated the surprising amount of writing that accompanied the art. It is for that reason that the works that "spoke" as well as "showed" will be the focus of this review. For the sake of clarity, I will temporarily become a full Vietnamese citizen and consider myself part of the "we."
Lighting the path through this review, however, will be a representational painting that spoke in images without text. "Black and White", by Nguyen Dam Thuy, consists of three panels, all of which are divided up into nine squares within which appear variations on one image, a kerosene lamp. Formally, it is a visual meditation on the way in which black and white define each other as well as contrast with one another. On some squares, a black lamp lies starkly against a white background. In others, a white lamp lies against a black background. In other squares, however, a black lamp is set against a black background such that it is hard to tell the difference between foreground and background.
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In addition to playing formally with the dualism of black and white as colors( and perhaps as attributes--black being traditionally the "lesser" color, white the superior), "Black and White" also calls into question the dualism of center and margin. Rather than uniformly showing the most clearly distinguished lamps in the center of each panel, the artist scatters them into random corners of each panel. In the right panel, a black lamp is in the middle panel. In the left panel, the black lamp is off to the side. In the middle panel, where one would expect to see the representative lamp in the middle, it is almost entirely black.
A lamp is a universal symbol for both the truth and its pursuit. |
This painting seems to answer the question "who are we" by answering that "we" are now people who are looking off-center, into the shades of meaning for answers, for the truth. It seems to offer another way to find truth outside of dualistic thinking or adhering to cliches. Could darkness and confusion be more illuminating than obvious cliches disguised as truth? Truth comes at us, this painting seems to say, from odd angles, in obscurity, in figures we must strain our eyes to look at, at figures we could easily overlook. This painting trains us to look for truth not as that which is the most defined, the most easily recognized, that which is in the center but what is off-center, in the unexpected, the inchoate. Is it calling tradition into question, the rigidity of what has lit the truth in the past for the possibility of lamps yet to be imagined? Light can come from unexpected places, this painting seems to say.
We can just look around us to find out who we are, says artist Hoang Duong Cam in his multi-layered and complex panoramic digital photo-montage "Surround Me- Me From Surround Attitude". We are made up of what surrounds us, this photo seems to say, and Cam 's work provides the most fractured and opaque vision of what that entity is. The artist's body is chopped up and divided in bits and pieces alongside "bits and pieces" of Saigon life. Cam 's face, chin and neck take up the first of about ten "layers" of the photo; his chest, stomach and crotch the middle layer; his feet, knees and legs the bottom. In between these body parts are layered images of Saigon life. In one layer, we see images of a traditional wedding and celebrations. In another layer, there are images of the environs around the building where the exhibit was shown. In another layer, we see the inside of the building including elevators and signs. In one portion, perhaps most subversively, Cam includes the image of an installation of live bees that was not given official permission to be shown at this exhibit, but nevertheless had a special room one had to know about and ask permission to see.
| Not only does the traditional and the modern not seem to add up, but the title itself is a linguisic nightmare, as convuluted and obfuscating as the signs of arrows pointing that seem to offer direction, to offer a way into the photograph, but which in fact keep the viewer at quite a distance.
To use the preposition "from" suggests one wants protection against an enemy. In English, we say "protect me from" something. The proper preposition for "surround" would be "surround me with" something. Cam plays with this and combines them, creating the ungrammatical but interesting "surround me from" ... |
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Does he want the traditional to surround him, represented by the Vietnamese wedding images, or does he want the "new", represented by the building and the "bee" exhibit to surround him? His body has taken them all in, but which, if any, has it digested?
Then one has to ask, what is a "surround attitude"? Is it the attitude in which one simply swallows tradition whole without asking questions? Has Cam been protected from that, has he resisted it, or has he swallowed it whole, but not quite digested it, accepted it? Many questions remain unanswered in this exhibit, including the open question concerning what exactly the "bee exhibit", by Rich, was about (I will have to write another essay to answer that. For the moment, it must remain an open secret in the same way it was in the exhibit).
Like the other works I have discussed in "Who Are We?", the last one, "Nam Im", by Bui Cong Khanh, is internally divided. In the right portion of the work, there is the painting of a head (it turns out, the artist's head) on its side as if trying to go to sleep. To the head's left are the scrawled lyrics of a Vietnamese folk lullaby which urge a child to be good "ngoan"--and go to bed. That both the head and the words are of equal size (in fact the words exceed the boundaries of the head, looping around a column in front of the painting) suggest that this exhortation to sleep and the attendant insomnia of the uneasy head are equal forces. |
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Simplistically, one side represents tradition. The other, the face of the modern figure unable to sleep, no matter how sweet the words and melody. "We" are people lulled by tradition and the exhortation to be good, but we are having a hard time reconciling the two. "Our" sleep is uneasy; the lullaby is not producing the proper effect, particularly now that the head is the head of an adult, not a child.
"Who are we?" showed this viewer that Vietnamese artists at the moment are defining themselves and their fellow are defining themselves |
are defining themselves and their fellow Vietnamese as people who are attempting to preserve and honor the past as well as trying to find a way into a future. Although it shows itself formally in many of these art works as division and multiplicity (rare was the single canvas in this show), we can see this positively. Taking our cue from "Black and White," we see that seeming opposites, like the traditional and the modern, require one another for their very definition. One could not exist without the other.
( by Barbara Herman ) |
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