Where The Sea Remembers – Part II
by Eddie Wong. Posted September 5, 2019.
One of the joys of being retired is having time to go to art exhibits. Although I always enjoyed art, especially music, theater, and film, I finally have a bit more patience or maybe it’s just the process of slowing down that makes me stop for several minutes to look at artwork and ponder its meaning. I don’t really know what I’m looking at sometimes, and reading about the artists adds immeasurably to my appreciation of their works. What appears to be a jumble of color is really much more. Art, after all, is a form of human expression, a distillation of how someone feels or interprets moments in life.
In Part One of my article about Where The Sea Remembers, I focused on the “Intimate Mythologies & New Histories” section of the exhibit. This article features my commentary on pieces of art that are scattered through different sections of the show. It is by no means an comprehensive overview to the exhibit. Nor am I an insightful art critic. Please go to The Mistake Room in Los Angeles and see the entire show. I hope this article and the videos created by the curators will spur your interest both in the show and in Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans.
From the entrance of the exhibit, off at the far end of the gallery, stands a block of bright red. It’s an indelible, irresistible image. Thu Van Tran’s De Vert a Orange appears to be a painting, but it’s not. In the artworks handout, the curators say the following about this striking image: “For her large-scale photographic work, De Vert a Orange, Thu Van Tran uses an experimental chemical process to transform a black-and-white silver gelatin print of a verdant forest into a burning red hellscape. In doing so, Thu Van summons into vivid color the memory of the United States’ indiscriminate chemical destruction of nature, antion, and persons during the Vietnam War – a conflict that led to the mass exile of Vietnamese people after the fall of Saigon. The work formally counters the atrocities that are most typically represented in the monochrome grey of the widely circulated newspaper photography from the era. The abstract nature of this work allows it to bring the horrors of the past into the present, and thus ominously warn of even greater fries to come if human hubris continues unchecked, and unrepentant militarism allowed free reign.”
With its pulsating, drenching smears of red slashing through black, De Vert a Orange seems alive, restless and angry. Perhaps the artist meant to convey a hallucinatory sense of horror; it did for me. It is one of the most powerful images in the entire show.
Thu Van Tran’s De Vert a Orange. Photo by Eddie Wong.
Thu Van Tran’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 2017. In this short video, she describes being a Vietnamese refugee in France and takes the viewer through an examination of her artistic process illuminating techniques that inform her work.
Tell me what you see in this next image. At first glance, I didn’t think much of it, just pleasant colors but rather unremarkable. But there’s much more behind the image and this speaks to the artist marking a specific event and sharing its significance.
“Blanket Works” by Tuán Andrew Nguyên
Although the color and shape of this collage are important, equally so is the material. The curators describe the artist’s process: “Tuán Andrew Nguyên pours epoxy resin on survival blankets to create unconventional paintings that are equal part psychological map, abstract expression, and personal readymade. In our highly visual media age, the thermal survival blanket has become something of an icon of displacement, being offered by authorities as a fleeting stand-in for belonging wherever political violence and/or natural disaster uproot communities. Tuán’s treatment of the material replenishes its diminishing impact, representing the blanket’s temporary promise of comfort and home as an otherworldly, uninhabitable, yet temptingly beautiful terrain. Through the abstracted form of this promised land, Tuán connects the blanket to his own experience of displacement and to the displacement of millions from their homelands in the 21st century.”
Flash forward to 2019 and the mylar survival blanket occupies our national consciousness as hundreds of migrant children and families use it for warmth while sleeping on cold, concrete floors at U.S. immigration detention centers. Tuán’s artwork reminds us that the materials of life can serve as commentary for larger social issues. Though the blanket was discarded by Tuán’s years ago, he has transformed it into something that serves another purpose today.
In 2014, Tuán Andrew Nguyên participated in the show “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia” held in New York. In this interview with the Asia Society, Tuán shares the origins of some of his work. Although he was born in Hanoi, he relocated with his family to New York in 1976. His training in art occurred in New York and California and his work is rooted in his Vietnamese American identity.
“The Leavers” by Trong Gia Nguyen. Photo by Eddie Wong.
Trong Gai Nguyen takes the family photo album and renders it a mysterious and opaque phenomenon. These paintings were based on his own family photos. The curators described them in this manner: “The images seem lifted from coloring books in which the outlines of the images are removed only to be filled in by oil pastels, a medium that never fully dries and renders figures with soft, blurred edges – an analog to the imperfect process of remembering…Collectively, The Leavers speak to the instability of memory – to its position between the history we seem to know and the incomplete ways in which we remember.”
In this video clip produced by The Mistake Room, Trong speaks of his outsider status as a relatively new resident in Ho Chi Minh City, a city undergoing vast changes. You can also see the origins of another one of his artworks in Where The Sea Remembers. Cracked Mobile No. 5 is a window grate from a colonial-era home, but placed on the wall as a piece of sculpture, it “not only represents technology’s invasion of privacy, but also acts an a metaphor for the structural effects of technology on Vietnamese culture.”
“Cracked Mobile No. 5” by Trong Gia Nguyen.
Another piece that renders deeper meaning and enjoyment both for its historical meaning and its aesthetics is Vō Trân Châu’s Green and Blue. These large tapestries are soothing images floating against the sterile white exhibition walls, but its true power rests upon understanding its historical context as well as marveling at their duality as pixelated images and pieces of fabric art. Thousands of cloth squares were assembled to reference historical photographs. Here’s how the curators describe Green and Blue: “While Green depicts a woman in a military dress with a helmet and rifle, Blue shows a woman in Western style clothing weaving in a textile factory in Saigon. Both take part in a long history of textile production – from producing its raw materials, to its manufacturing, consumption, and ultimate disposal or recycling.”
“Green and Blue” by Vō Trân Châu. Photo by Eddie Wong
In this video, you will see the painstaking care Vō Trân Châu lavishes on her fabric art starting with the tiny discarded pieces of fabric given to her and the hours of working the needle back and forth to stitch her patterns. Like all the videos created for the show by The Mistake Room, this one is also lyrical imparting a sense of the rhythms of the city and the flow of the artists’ practice.
Phang Quang’s Re/cover no. 9, no. 2, no. 6 marries documentary photography with symbolism to tell the story of the descendants of Japanese soldiers who started families with Vietnamese women during their occupation of Vietnam during World War II. After the war ended, the solders returned to Japan. The curators explain the artist’s intent: “Traveling to the rural region outside Hanoi where the descendants of these families live, Quang documented them in their homes – filled with images of their fathers and grandfathers and with testimonial objects that bear witness to the familial impact of displacement and borders. To capture the presence of these lost forefathers, Quang draped his subjects with a white chiffon fabric traditionally associated with Japanese wedding ceremonies. The veils render the ghostly presences of the Japanese soldiers visible while also marking the subjects to highlight the way they’ve been othered and discriminated against… Quang challenges the defining nature of the historical archive – asking us to reflect on the possibility of image-making as a tool for healing.”
“Re/cover no. 9, no. 2, no. 6” by Phang Quang. Photo by Eddie Wong.
