Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set in the haunting space of an ex-colonial rubber plantation in Central Vietnam, Phuong Linh Nguyen’s film Memory of the Blind Elephant is a tender portrait of the complex economies of interspecies trauma and resilience in the face of continued extraction and destruction. Formerly present in the coronation of Potau Apui (the Jarai King of Fire), in Dr. Yersin’s exploratory crew during the colonial period, and now a major draw for tourists, the figure of the elephant is ailing, grievous, as though haunting its habitat. Intrigued by the reality she observed, Phuong Linh gathered, documented, altered, repositioned the local materials of ceaseless exploitation of natural resources: raw rubber, ferrosols, and aluminium to assert a critical proposition.

Photography (Photography)

Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco. The photograph is a documentation of a Golden Gate Bridge performance that makes palpable the tensions between people and the military, the individual and the group, danger and ordinary life. Lin recalls: “Fighter planes repetitively flew over my head.

Photography (Photography)

For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road , Lin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou. He then took bricks from the sidewalk end of the wall and moved them to the street side, slowly extending the wall into the street. Repeating the same gesture for hours, he leapfrogged the whole wall across the street.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Jet Folder & Data Tree (2013) offers a humorous take on how computer and screen-based technologies affect our relationship to the natural world. In a statement through his gallery, Gallery Yang, Lin remarks that “one day in 2010, I discovered that the folders in my computer began talking to me. So I created lots of empty folders with no content but name.” Lin’s print, by extension, functions as a collage in which screen-based media becomes part of the natural world, and vice versa.

Photography (Photography)

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province. It begins with sound – perhaps a hammer, or a gong – the lack of image making its identification difficult. A landscape emerges of an open field where a farmer tends his grazing cow herd.

Installation (Installation)

Landscape Series no. 1 presents landscape as a “quiet witness of history.” It began with searches of online archives of Vietnamese news-media, for images of figures in landscapes “pointing, to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing.” The uniformity is striking but the sequence is subtly structured: the typology hints at narrative progression, though of an uninformative narrative, lacking details.

Photography (Photography)

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.

Photography (Photography)

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.

Installation (Installation)

On September 22, 1940 the French signed an accord, which granted Japanese troops the right to occupy Indochina. The Japanese presence in Indochina lasted until the end of World War II and during the occupation, jute supplies from India were interrupted. Jute was used to make sacks as well as gunpowder, a crucial material for the war industry.

Photography (Photography)

To produce her photo and film works, Diane Severin Nguyen makes amalgam sculptures from found materials, both natural and synthetic. She captures these ephemeral constructions at close range, enlarging minute tensions. Nguyen uses transient, prosthetic lighting—the glow of sunset, an iPhone flash, battery-powered LEDs, fire—so that the camera intervenes moments before these temporary arrangements and their lighting change.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

ÆTHER (Poor Objects) by Li Shuang builds on the artist’s consideration of the interplay between physical and digital spaces. Through a kaleidoscopic video collage, Li examines the complexities of personal subjectivity within an increasingly immersive and omnipresent online culture. Among disparate imagery that includes extra-terrestrial simulations, dizzying hordes of birds, animated figures trapped in dystopian virtual spaces, and real-life abandoned places, the video references the Chinese creation myth of Nuwa, a goddess who uses her own body to repair the sky.

Installation (Installation)

The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096. Yet Chong photographed these public spaces (shopping centers, museums, MRT stations and schools) between 2004 and 2010. Calendars continues Hong’s conceptual investigation of the intersections between time, space and situation.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Four knives appearing as if thrown at the wall to alleviate frustration and boredom, form rhythmic shadows and markings of time above a translated phrase boldly printed in simplified Chinese and English. While the English reads “But Now I Manufacture Hate, Every Single Day,” the Chinese, resultant from Google Translate in 2011, reads awkwardly to something meaning “now I manufacture black special.” The term “black special” is derived from a transliteration of the word “hate” into the sound “heite”, where the corresponding written characters literally denote “black special”. The rigidity of the machine translation also preserved the syntax of English, forcing the Chinese to crudely abide by English grammar.

Installation (Installation)

Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers. These novels were mostly written by Taiwanese and Hong Kong writers in the 1980s to the 1990s to meet the cultural needs of the new social classes before being imported into China after the Chinese economic reform in the late 1980s. As contemporary China industry developed, a large number of workers became readers of this new pulp fiction.

Photography (Photography)

Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist. It marks a new dimension of his ongoing effort to negotiate with the postcolonial reality across the world, with a unique interventional strategy to deal with the French society. Named after a soap opera in U. S. which has been running practically everyday for over 40 years, Days Of Our Lives is a series of six photographs which explores this new Europeaness.

Photography (Photography)

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Truong Cong Tung’s Journey of a Piece of Soil (2013) and its accompanying object-based installation of the same name (2014) consider the function of ritual in larger modes of collective engagement and cultural production. In examining how spirituality inflects social engagement, Truong’s contemplates the juncture at which the rational beings encounter the unexplained while also suggesting how embodied practices offer vital conduits for experiencing new modes of consciousness. The video features a man dressed in camouflage fatigues with a blue cap tilling a patch of red-clay soil amidst a green-stalk covered patch of land.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For the work Wigan Pit-Brow Women: Intersections with the Caribbean (mobile) , Candice Lin studied English Victorian Arthur Munby’s racialized and masculinized drawings of working-class white female miners. Specifically, Lin’s work critically addresses Munby’s observations about the laborers’ femininity that was more concerned with the modesty of the women, than that they toiled in life-threatening situations. “Pit brow women” or “pit brow lasses” were female surface laborers at British collieries.

Photography (Photography)

All his artworks utilize the use of body – the artist’s own body and that of others. The Result of 1000 Pieces typi?es an image of Lin: Lin is standing in an empty hole of a brick wall. By incorporating the brick wall for his work, Lin develops a speci?c strategy to question and negotiate with the relationship between people and the changing environments.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lightning 01 (2014) parodies our contemporary relationship to screen-based media and the absurdity of aestheticizing boredom. The video depicts a computer user aimlessly taking photos of himself, seemingly numb to external stimuli or intervention. Set on a loop, the video produces the illusion of an endless state of bored selfies and disaffected gazes.

Painting (Painting)

With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006. Entitled “Bibliography (1): The Lonely Ones,” the list outlines representations of solitude that has been imposed on individuals or communities. Chong divides these archetypes into three over-arching notions: the Hide-away, the Castaway and the Prisoner.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Selected Scripture is a series of silkscreen prints that Hong Hao has been working on since the 1980s. The series includes 37 prints to date, each of which resemble the pages of an ancient cartography book. In this series, the artist reflects on the authoritative influence of ancient books that shape dominant understandings of the world.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Selected Scripture is a series of silkscreen prints that Hong Hao has been working on since the 1980s. The series includes 37 prints to date, each of which resemble pages of an ancient open cartography book. In this series, the artist reflects on the authoritative influence of ancient books that shape dominant understandings of the world.

Photography (Photography)

Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition. The title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior.

Photography (Photography)

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.

This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.

Photography (Photography)

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.

Photography (Photography)

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.