Field of Shredded Paper

Over the span of three weeks, 2000+ found photographs of the Vietnam War from the Internet were printed and shredded immediately with a paper shredder. The physical photographs exist only for a fleeting moment, still damp with ink, within a repeated process of view–print–shred. What is left of this performative action is strewn throughout the exhibition floor. The remains of a series of violent historical events begin to look strikingly similar to one another, each shredded piece acting as part of a whole, blurring past and present into a symbolic, unsolvable puzzle of disremembering.

 

Cyano-Collage 050

The work was commissioned by Post Vidai during Wu Chi-Tsung’s residency period at Mot+++ in Saigon in 2018 and 2019.

In the early spring of 2015, Mr. Ni Tsai-Chin, a prestigious artist and art critic in Taiwan, died of disease. When learning the news, I recalled a summer vacation more than 10 years ago some friends and I served as assistants of Mr. Ni. We experienced a memorable summer in Mr. Ni’s dormitory in Tunghai University. Being indulged in calligraphy and ink art all day, we often chatted extensively from southern transition of Chinese landscape paintings in Song dynasty to the western art made in Taiwan. His expanded horizons, insightful arguments, integrated knowledge of traditional and contemporary arts, and persistence in defending cultural subjectivity have nourished my art development since my novice periods. To commemorate Mr. Ni, I present Cyano-Collage in a form of ink painting collage, what is Mr. Ni’s conventional method, combines with wrinkled-texture cyanotype. Rice papers with photosensitive coating were wrinkled and exposed under sunlight to record the lighting and shading on the paper. A selection from dozens of pieces of cyanotype photographic paper was reorganized and edited before mounting on a canvas. The work is displayed in a style resembling Chinese Shan Shui and photomontage. Cyano-Collage substitutes ink and brush strokes used in traditional Chinese Shan Shui with experimental photography to interpret the imagery of landscape in Eastern culture.

Cyano-Collage 065

In the early spring of 2015, Mr. Ni Tsai-Chin, a prestigious artist and art critic in Taiwan, died of disease. When learning the news, I recalled a summer vacation more than 10 years ago some friends and I served as assistants of Mr. Ni. We experienced a memorable summer in Mr. Ni’s dormitory in Tunghai University. Being indulged in calligraphy and ink art all day, we often chatted extensively from southern transition of Chinese landscape paintings in Song dynasty to the western art made in Taiwan. His expanded horizons, insightful arguments, integrated knowledge of traditional and contemporary arts, and persistence in defending cultural subjectivity have nourished my art development since my novice periods. To commemorate Mr. Ni, I present Cyano-Collage in a form of ink painting collage, what is Mr. Ni’s conventional method, combines with wrinkled-texture cyanotype. Rice papers with photosensitive coating were wrinkled and exposed under sunlight to record the lighting and shading on the paper. A selection from dozens of pieces of cyanotype photographic paper was reorganized and edited before mounting on a canvas. The work is displayed in a style resembling Chinese Shan Shui and photomontage. Cyano-Collage substitutes ink and brush strokes used in traditional Chinese Shan Shui with experimental photography to interpret the imagery of landscape in Eastern culture.

Exhale, Inhale Again

‘Coral Sea As Rolling Thunder’ (2017) installation for Art Basel Statements traces how rapid economic growth, communication and exchange alters subjecthood in contemporary Vietnam.

Tieu has further shot a series of photographs in response to the environmental incident, which occurred in 2016, when Formosa Plastics Group released toxic chemicals into the ocean, where Tieu during this time shot her video work. Across the installation – ranging from the three photographs Inhale, Exhale, Inhale Again (all 2017) hung on melted aluminium bars and a LED sculpture installation – Tieu expands on the exploration of the fragility of the body, singling out details of the daily exposure to pollution. The sculptural LED work shows the marine weather forecasts for the South China Sea, an area in front of the Vietnamese coastline that is currently claimed by China and where Formosa’s toxic spill occurred. In these weather forecasts Tieu investigates unforeseeable influences causing humans and environments to adapt, alter and self-repair. Underpinning the installation, the modified aluminium structure, reminiscent of this observation, references architectural design and the organic body equally, thus pointing out the interactions and crossing lines between corporate and individual responsibility, private and public sectors.

Inhale

‘Coral Sea As Rolling Thunder’ (2017) installation for Art Basel Statements traces how rapid economic growth, communication and exchange alters subjecthood in contemporary Vietnam.

Tieu has further shot a series of photographs in response to the environmental incident, which occurred in 2016, when Formosa Plastics Group released toxic chemicals into the ocean, where Tieu during this time shot her video work. Across the installation – ranging from the three photographs Inhale, Exhale, Inhale Again (all 2017) hung on melted aluminium bars and a LED sculpture installation – Tieu expands on the exploration of the fragility of the body, singling out details of the daily exposure to pollution. The sculptural LED work shows the marine weather forecasts for the South China Sea, an area in front of the Vietnamese coastline that is currently claimed by China and where Formosa’s toxic spill occurred. In these weather forecasts Tieu investigates unforeseeable influences causing humans and environments to adapt, alter and self-repair. Underpinning the installation, the modified aluminium structure, reminiscent of this observation, references architectural design and the organic body equally, thus pointing out the interactions and crossing lines between corporate and individual responsibility, private and public sectors.

Light Portrait

Fascinated by science, these artworks are results of Ngọc Nâu’s understanding of light, from the perspective of physics, chemistry, astronomy, philosophy and psychology. Her ‘light’-searching journey reaches a climax in the photographic light-box ‘Light portrait’, where thousands of stars shine through punctuated holes, as if her soul is undergoing perpetual enlightenment.

Multiple Entry Visa

Journey to the West

An immense temperate forest poured in sunshine spreads over the triptych: a spectacle landscape seemingly embraces human, here a petite monk. However, all of these context and character evoke darker stories than their original appearance. The artwork was inspired by the famous Wisconsin case of 2004, when a Laotian American with Hmong descent man shot 6 white hunters after he stepped into their private hunting area and then was denigrated racially. The forest is no longer a peaceful and neutral landscape. It is divided between public and private property, which immigrants from tropical countries of mountains and dense jungles are difficult to understand. The monk robe worn by the character, here role played by Howard Henry, makes us think of the hunter’s orange jacket rather than the peaceful religious image from bygone Indochina. The artist named his work Journey to the West, as an analogy between Xuanzang’s travel to the West (India) to acquire the ancient Buddhist scriptures, and the immigration to Western countries of modern time. Both of these ‘journeys to the West’ are narrated and seen by exotic lore, one by a Ming Dynasty novelist, and the other by Western perspective on Asia and Asian Americans. The work is an ambiguity of multiple stories and symbols integrated into one another, reflecting the complexity of American social realities and phenomena from post-Vietnam war period to the present.

Self

Thy Trần fills her photos with human bodies, but they are immediately and deliberately impersonal. Extensive staging, concealing, and cropping reduce her models to figures. Unremarkable, domestic settings – walls, beds, floors, curtains – fill out the frame. Her equipment, a 35mm film camera with an occasional mounted flash, further distorts and downplays the particulars of settings. This conservatism leaves hardly any accessible content besides bodies and forms. Exposed, contorted figures arouse but do not satisfy our curiosity. If the photos are intimate, this intimacy is not extended to us. The stories that typically inspire and explain the snapshot aesthetic are excavated. Revealing and concealing are central to her work, and are used to engage us with actively suggestive bodies, without any pretense of having captured the person in front of the lens. (Kevin Knuepfer)