Lacquerscope #1 and #2 (Palimpsest A-F series)

2011 - Installation (Installation)

Dimensions variable

Phi Phi Oanh

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Palimpsest is a series of what artist Phi Phi Oanh calls “pictorial installations”. Lacquerscope is the name she has given to the lacquer projection machines that she created from lenses and old parts of small format film projectors. The name harkens back to the early age of mechanical reproduction that also coincides with the “invention” of Vietnamese lacquer painting in the last century. Here the lacquerscope projects images from small glass slides, which she refers to as specimens of lacquer skin–a concept and technique that she developed to speak of a ‘dematerialized’ lacquer image. Recalling the experience of a scientific laboratory, these glass fragments reminiscent of microscopic slides are found on small light-box ‘beds’, each slide inked with a lacquer ‘skin’ (layers of lacquer in particular hue and pattern). These slides are then each rotated through the lacquerscope, projecting each ‘painting’ on an opposite suspended screen. The resulting projections are the shadows of these small lacquer paintings. The ‘voc’ (or what in painting discipline we call the ‘canvas’) is thus a tiny glass slide where lacquer is dematerialized, its nature projected as light, lifted away from the weight of sap, thus its ‘image’, its ‘experience’ made anew. The projections are reminiscent of images seen through a telescope or a microscope that present a macro or micro view of a universe invisible to the naked eye if not for the aid of a lens. Beginning Oanh’s exploration of lacquer as a haptic process, Palimpsest touches on a number of elements to reflect on how we interact with reality in the present, including the manipulation of visible light, a constant shift in scale and perspective, and a deference to what is seen through an apparatus or a machine. The work also revisits the traditional study and definition of lacquer as a 21st century medium of relevance, thus challenging official curricula on the teaching of contemporary art (especially in Vietnam), and situating Vietnamese lacquer “S?n ta” painting between the discipline of painting and photography.

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Phi Phi Oanh’s unique practice and methodology is anchored in the study of lacquer and pushes the boundaries of the material as a sculptural and conceptual form. Referring to her artworks as organs and as becoming beings with their own personalities harkening a kind of consciousness, and to the process of layering sap as a kind of ‘skin’ (sap being from the cây s?n tree), she believes lacquer to possess its own breathing body. She celebrates lacquer as an interface, experienced via light and movement–two essential elements to nearly all forms of life and two signature concepts of her broader practice. She is also drawn to lacquer’s highly laborious and lengthy process of production, deeply aware that machines, which overly exert a sense of efficiency in our 21st century haptic lives, overly dominate our everyday as a measurement of time.

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Colors:

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• engineering.n.02
• materiality.n.02
• immateriality.n.02
• space.n.01
• history.n.01