For P.3, The Propeller Group and Christopher Myers, based between New York City, Los Angeles and
Saigon, have joined forces with a call-and-response-like curatorial gesture to create “Shrine”. They have encapsulated the elusive butterfly effect — the theory of "nonlocality” whereby two distinct phenomena affect one another across a vast expanse of space and time. They explore the celebratory and unique funeral ceremonies of Saigon and New Orleans: two cities, two cultures, mirroring each other from worlds apart.
The title of The Propeller Group’s film, “The Living Need Light, And The Dead Need Music”, which will be accompanied by a sculptural installation of garments and instruments by Myers, is taken from a
Vietnamese proverb. The film focuses on the ceremony of the funeral wake in Vietnam. A cast of spiritual mediums, professional criers and musicians help lead these multiple day mournings into euphoric public events. The off-kilter soundtrack of the film plays the lead character, as funeral bands embody popular musical tunes moving in and out of synchronicity, harmony and cacophony. In Vietnam, the history of the funeral wake, music, and processions that surround these ceremonies, is reflective of long traditions of ancestral worship. The purpose is not to bury the deceased, but to see them off on their journey to the immortal world and is expressed usually in uplifting and happy music as the coffin is carried to the tomb.
“One of the gifts of the Global South,” the artists say, is “this ability to be many things, from many periods of time, many places at once.” Such a feat may seem absurd — but that’s part of the magic and the
Einsteinian science of inheriting dislocated and fragmented traditions. “Shrine” collapses distance to reveal otherness as an optical illusion, the hallucinogenic spell of nearsightedness. What emerges is a glorious, pulsating “future sound,” as they call it, born between two cultures that have traversed centuries of violence and colonialism.
Brief Biography
The Propeller Group, with headquarters in both Vietnam and Los Angeles, California, was established in
2006 as a cross-disciplinary structure for creating ambitious art projects. With backgrounds in visual art, film, and video, Phunam, Matthew Lucero, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen created the collective to reexamine power structures by utilizing mass media and popular culture. In addition to gallery spaces and museums, the group reinserts their work into different media landscapes, having aired on mainstream television and featured in international film festivals. A video work made in collaboration with Dinh Q. Lê entitled “The
Farmers and the Helicopters”, is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. More recent projects produced in collaboration with the Danish art collective, Superflex, include “The Financial Crisis”, a series of PSAs created for Frieze Art Fair and screened on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen studied studio art, digital media and film studies at the University of California,
Irvine and received an M.F.A. from the CalArts in 2004. Tuan’s film works have been shown in film festivals internationally.
“Prospect.3: Notes for Now” at the UNO St. Claude Gallery

Matt Lucero received an M.F.A. from CalArts in 2003 and has exhibited at Harris Lieberman, New York;
Lombard Freid, New York; LAXART, Los Angeles; and in the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County
Museum of Art.
Phunam studied antique restoration and Khmer stone sculpting in Bangkok, traditional Thai bronze casting in Chiang Mai, Thailand and oil painting restoration in Hanoi, Vietnam. Phunam is a self-taught cinematographer.
Christopher Myers is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. His work has been shown at venues including
PS1/MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the ICA in Philadelphia, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Contrasts
Gallery in Shanghai, and the Goethe Institute in Accra. He has exhibited an installation in Ouagadougou for the Prince Claus Fund’s arts festival, in which he set recorded marketplace calls from several cities
(Saigon, Kigali, Brooklyn, Lahore, Mexico City) in conversation with each other; he premiered his first film at Sundance, a short about the changing economy and technology of Kenya entitled, “Am I Going too
Fast?” in collaboration with the artist Hank Willis Thomas; and he collaborated with Kaneza Schaal on a performative translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and
Performance Space 122. He is currently on the Advisory Board of Conscious Realities, a lecture/residency series in Ho Chi Minh City advocating South/South exchange, and LitWorld, a global literacy initiative. http://www.the-propeller-group.com/
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“Prospect.3: Notes for Now” at the UNO St. Claude Gallery