Spring Watching Pavilion
curated by Orla Ryan
Art Labor Collective, Dinh Q.Lê, The Propeller Group, Lin + Lam, Ngoc Nau, Linh Phuong
Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai, Nguyễn Trinh Thi,Tran Minh Duc
Spring Watching Pavilion presents the first major exhibition of contemporary Vietnamese art
in Ireland. 2015 marks the 40th anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon’ and the end of the
Vietnam/ American war. Spring Watching Pavilion exhibits the work of 14 artists who mostly
work in lens based media and participatory/socially engaged practice. The historical residues
of the war through memory, personal narratives, hope and mourning are woven into a multi
layered reflection on the complexity of contemporary Vietnamese life. The artists in Spring
Watching Pavilion in a variety of formal and conceptual ways present a dynamic layering of
temporality and looking. In directing attention to perspective and point of view the artists
gathered here create both a poetic and ethical vantage point which speaks to the current
complexities of the geo-political global environment.
The title of this exhibition is taken from a poem of the same name by the 19 thcentury
Vietnamese poet Hồ Xuân Hương.
Reception area
The Propeller Group (Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles) Television Commercial for
Communism (TVCC) (2011) Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phunam and Matt Lucero formed The
Propeller Group in 2006. The one minute advertisement shown here is the culmination of a
project in which The Propeller Group asked an advertising agency “to imagine that the last
five remaining communist countries hired them to create a global advertising campaign to
rebrand the idea of communism.” By approaching TBWA/ Vietnam a global firm that
represents multinationals such as Apple and McDonalds, The Propeller Group create a
conceptual space where advertising and marketing collides with visual art in an intriguing
way. TVCC continues in Gallery 1.
Gallery 1
In the centre of the gallery The Propeller Group’s TVCC continues with the multichannel
video installation which documents TBWA/Vietnam’s brainstorming sessions. TVCC allows
The Propeller group to reflect the shifting relationships between communism and capitalism
from the Vietnam war and its media history to the globalized spaces of contemporary
Vietnam.
Tran Minh Duc ( Ho Chi Minh City). The two photographic diptychs shown here are part of a
series entitled Strangers (2015). In a humorous way Tran Minh explores the transformation
of Ho Chi Minh City. Asking local workers and passersby to pose in front of hoardings of
large scale building projects, Tran Minh’s project reflects on the globalized fantasies mapped
on the hoarding with the down to earth quotidian humour of the bemused local traders and
a passerby.
Linh Phuong Nguyen (Hanoi and Frankfurt) Sanctified Clouds (2013) is an archive by the
artist of over 110 images of bomb explosions taken from the web and cropped/sanctified to
show only “the smoke and clouds.” In this work the artist reflects on the historical reality of
six decades of continual fighting in Vietnam (1930-1980) and perhaps a younger generation’s
psychic desire to leave that history behind.
Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai (Berlin and Hanoi) Shadow (2014) is part of a larger project which
began while on a residency in Cambodia and explores some of the complexities of migration.
Engaging with a Vietnamese fishing community near the Tonie Sap Lake in Siem Reap, her
work investigates the human cost of falling between states, this community are not
accepted as Cambodian Citizens nor Vietnamese and treated with suspicion on returning to
Vietnam. (Her documentary video Day by Day (2015) will be screened as part of the
screening programme later in the exhibition.)
Art Labor Collective (Ho Chi Minh City) have three core members, artists Phan Thao Nguyen
and Truong Cong Tung (whose work will also be part of the screening programme) and
curator/writer Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran. Their artist book Unconditional Belief (2014) started
as a participatory project in 2012 and explores vision from an ophthalmological perspective
and through the filter of belief. The project included an exhibition, workshop, public artwork
at the Eye Hospital and this book.
Art Labor Collective’s current project Jarai Dew, (2015-) explores the beliefs of the Jarai
People (one of 54 officially recognised ethnic minorities) in the Central Highlands of
Vietnam. The Jarai a matriarchal culture combining Animist religious belief with
Protestantism, believe that after death, the human will go through many stages, the final
stage transforming into dew (iangôm in Jarai language) evaporating to the environment –
the state of non-being – the beginning particles of new existence.
The strong cultural identity of the Jarai people, evident in their language lifestyle and
relationship to the land are very different from the dominant ethnic group (Kinh). The
community of 400,000 live in small villages in the forests and mountains in an area of more
than 15,000 km2. In the last 15 years, the Vietnamese government’s ‘modernisation’ policy
in the Central Highlands involves expanding the Kinh population in the area to develop
intensive coffee, rubber and pepper plantation. Deforestation and subsequent land sale to
the Kinh people turns the Jarai into employees (paid daily)of the new Kinh landowners,
which is contributing to the young generation rejecting Jarai culture. Art Labor has been
observing this rapid transformation in Pa Pét - a small, impoverished Jarai village, as a way to
take a critical view on the modernization of Vietnam and its fragile position in relation to
globalization.
Gallery 2
Dinh Q Lê (Ho Chi Minh City) The Farmers and The Helicopters (2006) is a three-channel
video installation. Here he weaves personal narratives and recollections of local farmers of
the war with fragments of Hollywood and documentary film footage. This process
significantly shifts perspectives around discussion of the American war as it is known in
Vietnam. While considering this history of the helicopter and the childhood memories of fear
recounted in the work Lê also focuses attention on the present as we meet Le Van Danh, a
farmer, and Tran Quoc Hai, a self-taught mechanic. Lê in an interview with Carolee Thea
(Brooklyn Rail 2010) comments:
“In 2006, I read an article in a Vietnamese newspaper about a farmer, a self-taught mechanic
living in a remote farming community, who was building a life sized functional helicopter.
When he began testing, the local government freaked out, disputed its safety, and seized it.
A public outrage followed until engineers and scientists stepped up to help the farmers and
assure its functional safety, and the government relented. I became interested because the
farmers’ motive was to put the helicopter to good use, for emergency evacuations, to
fertilize the fields, etc. The transformation of a war machine into a peaceful, useful object is
akin to a time in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam when wild elephants came into villages,
trampling crops and killing people. Once captured and domesticated, these powerful beings
were put to good use.”
Gallery 3
Nguyen Trinh Thi (Hanoi, Berlin) Landscape Series# 1 (2013) video projection and series of
postcards presents “landscape as the silent witness of history.” This work is based on Thi’s
ongoing interest in ‘problematic landscapes’ which have traumatic pasts or are contested by
locals against government or corporate pressures. Thi has honed in on the vernacular
journalistic representational strategy usually employed to represent the specific problem,
that is, getting a local to stand in the frame and point. This creates an ambiguous narrative.
Here you are not told each individual story, instead the strategy of pointing into the distance
(eventually ending in one character pointing at his head where he has been hit) comes under
a form of creative media analysis and deconstruction. The work also alludes to a recurring
problem of representation when the issue or history is not visually evident in the landscape
or environment, when an image of the location is not enough. Thi’s presentation of these
images as sepia toned postcards also question how different contexts shape how we may
read these images. Re-deploying these journalistic images into nostalgic colonial style
postcards asks us to think about the representational tropes of early colonial
ethnography/documentary practices and the inherent relationship to travel and the
exoticism of adventure for the colonial traveller.
Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam, New York) Tomorrow I Leave video projection and
photographs. Thana tourism, also known as dark or death tourism, refers to the exhibition,
promotion and attraction to sites such as concentration camps, natural disasters, terror
attacks, burial grounds and memorials. This particular form of “negative sightseeing”
operates as part of the recreational landscape of tourism. In recent years a number of
former Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong and Malaysia have been marketed as
tourist and recreational spots.
Lin + Lam’s work considers the transformation of these sites of trauma now entwined in the
language of leisure, heritage and memorialisation. Thinking about the increasing reunion
tours to former refugee camps Lin + Lam visited the island of Pulau Bidong, Malaysia. This
island went from being an uninhabited island, (one square kilometre in area) to at one stage,
being the most densely populated area in the world. After the end of the Vietnam war,
political retributions coupled with poverty and the total destruction of the country caused
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee the country. On the island of Pulau Bidong
some 250,000 Vietnamese refugees were accommodated over the years. Pulau Bidong was
officially closed on October 30th 1991.
The title of this installation Tomorrow I Leave (Ngay Mai Em Di) is a line from a famous song
that was customarily heard over the intercom when an internee was discharged from a
refugee camp, either to settle in the West or to be repatriated. It is a song of both hope and
mourning, and speaks to the conflictual feelings that are called upon when one stands at the
“horizon of expectation” facing an emotional and temporal junction, from the legacy of the
war to an aspiration towards freedom. Lin + Lam’s Tomorrow I Leave asks what happens to
memory and politics in the absence of ruins.
Stairwell to Process Room
Ngoc Nau Ba Chua Thuong Ngan - (The Goddess of the forest and mountains 2015).In this
experimental video Nau’s performance reinterprets the ritual practice of hầu
đồng(“receiving incarnations of the deities") a form of spiritual mediumship in which music is
used to induce a trance. Ba Chua Thuong Ngan is the soul of the mountains. When
celebrating her, people must reconstruct votive offerings of buildings in paper to repay the
goddess for their exploitation of the natural resources. This work relates to Nau’s ongoing
research on mining in Thái Nguyên. Her practice moves from folklore to the everyday of
ordinary worker’s lives, to geological time and to current scientific research.