Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora Jun 30, 2012 - Oct 7, 2012 Closing Reception: October 6, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM, Free Colloquium: October 7, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM, Free

ARTIST STATEMENTS

ANIDA YOEU ALI

Palimpsest for Generation 1.5 3-channel video installation of original performance and installation in December 2009.

Inspired by a scene in Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior, my performance included inscriptions written onto my back and the gesture of washing them away. Embodying the archetype of the universal mother/woman warrior figure who nurtures despite witnessing violence and atrocities, I sat exposed and faceless. In the performance, my body transformed into a palimpsest where histories were inscribed, one moment layered over another. Referencing the potency of historical memory, no moment once inscribed is ever quite erasable. In the performance, I sat covered under a cascading head of hair in which only my back was exposed. Text pulled from my family’s memories and histories related to Cambodia were inscribed in ink onto my back. As a result of the act, ink and water dripped onto my back and stained the dress. When the gestures of washing and staining ended, the body left the installation. Detached roots, a disembodied dress, and faint traces of a performed history remained.

This is a 3-channel video installation of edited footage from the actual durational performance and installation. Here the experience is condensed and looped over and over to give the viewer a sense of repetition and weight. This work continues my examination into the cultural and emotional resonance of place and memory in relationship to personal histories of violence. My works continues to engage by using the body and audience to complete a work of art.

REANNE ESTRADA

I make works that aspire to be unstable. Of questionable pedigree and dubious archival quality, they harbor fluctuating identities and a conspicuous self-destructive streak. My work is best described as process- intensive high-relief drawing or low-relief sculpture. Existing between two and three dimensions, it faces regular crises of identity and occupies a vacillating in-between space.

I use everyday materials and painstakingly gussy them up to “pass” as art. The works are fine mimics: Ivory Soap™ passes as ivory, erasers for smooth stones, wax or candy, packing tape for crystalline formations. Yet for all their aesthetic allure, they are inherently unstable. They pay homage to the horror of beauty, defined as the threat of its loss, and embrace contradictory impulses. Absurdly labor-intensive to create as art objects, they are encoded with the capacity to self-destruct almost instantaneously, to undo their identity as art by doing what they were originally meant to do (erasers to erase, soap to wash, puzzles to well, puzzle). Many works shift between drawing and sculpture, often compromising physical integrity in the process. Packing tape and erasers are methodically gutted, surgically cut up and put back together again; solid three-dimensional things turned into delicate line drawings and vice-versa. Part meditation on built-in obsolescence, part concession to the indefatigable forces of entropy, my work alludes to the fragility of the body and serves as a metaphor for the mutable, unstable nature of identity.

LIN + LAM

Unidentified Vietnam No. 18 is a successor to the seventeen films in the Library of Congress South Vietnam Embassy Collection labeled only “Unidentified Vietnam, # 1-17." Initiated by these 1960’s propaganda films, the project calls into question the policies and politics of nation building.

Lin + Lam investigate the contested relationship between Vietnam and the US, and counter mainstream media by asking viewers to re-define the ways historical understanding is constructed. With exacting attention, the directors mine the material artifacts of the archive, fingering deteriorating film labels and paging through catalogue lists. Situated within the present, the filmmakers inhabit the past by re-enacting propagandistic gestures, such as a pledge of fidelity and a military exercise. Spectral images salvaged from a now non-existent republic haunt the mausoleum-like hallways, reminding us of what remains unidentifiable in the process of recovery. Through these actions of retrieval and remembrance, the film ponders how US intervention has failed, and considers the dangers of its repetition.

ANN PHONG

Seawater inspires me. Its transparency underneath the bright sun allows me to see different depths in it. Its sudden changing moods remind me of the ups and downs of life. I have crossed the Pacific Ocean from one end to the other many decades ago. That journey has left a colorful imprint on my life.

Sitting in front of my canvas, I challenge myself as if I were fighting for survival. I pour my paint, push my strokes, swing my arm, drip, wipe, struggle, contemplate, and continue repeating these actions. I may record the people I have come across, children I have met. Often vessels are also included as part of my images. In Vietnamese poetry, harbors are metaphors for men and boats are for women. Women are like boats due to their delicacy in shape and elegance in movement on water. When a woman is not married, she is not “anchored down” to a harbor. Boats are also a reference of immigrants and its association with “Boat people”, a label that American newspapers and magazines gave us three decades ago, when we escaped Vietnamese communism by fleeing on small boats. During the process of creating art, lines, shapes, shades, colors and textures are tools for me to communicate with. When the visual part integrates with my feelings, it is time for these actions to stop.

NALYNE LUNATI

Life - like art - is the best way to describe Nalyne Lunati’s creative process. She believes art making is a sacred ritual that comes from the inner most depth of your soul. She agrees with Mark Rothko that, "art is an anecdote of the human spirit." Thus, fixation on one particular style has limitation on telling the whole story of the human spirit. Her work reinvigorates and merges formalism, abstract expressionism and gestural mark making to evoke descriptive and narrative properties. The iconography is inspired from her cross cultural experiences, travels, life experiences and nature.

Lunati lives on the edge, managing a prominent art school and studio practice. She prides herself on being an artist and art entrepreneur. In addition to a solid fine arts education, she is grateful for having a diverse and rich educational background in Political Economy of Industrial Societies, Business Administration, Southeast Asian Studies, Anthropology, and foreign languages. These influences and life experiences inform her work conceptually and thematically, creating thought provoking and technically well executed artwork. Climate change and the integration of Eastern philosophies with Western aesthetics are some of her passionate topics. She was able to reconnect with the Thai Forest tradition Buddhism while in graduate school. Ever since then, she incorporates aspects of awareness and mindfulness in her artwork. Whether painting about political issues or nurturing a spiritual calling, she executes the paintings with the Dhamma (Dharma) in mind.

HONG-AN TRUONG

The Past is a Distant Colony and Explosions in the Sky (Diên Biên Phú 1954) are part of a larger project called Adaptation Fever, which includes four-single channel videos. These discrete video works approach the archive through appropriation and disruption, using a doubling device where colonial sounds and scenes are mirrored and juxtaposed against each other. Using found footage of Viet Nam during French colonialism, this project explores questions about the politics of representation and the construction of identity and difference in relation to history, time, and memory. The split screen and juxtaposition become a simple technique whereby the “real” and by extension, its historical referent, are permanently deferred objects, further diminished through the overdubbed narratives in Vietnamese and French which are only tersely summarized in either English subtitles or not at all. Playing with the idea that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience, and also by the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the other’s desire for that present, this video appropriates archival images as a way to consider postcolonial subjectivity and sentimentality. JULIE THI UNDERHILL

At the heart of my work is a desire to acknowledge what usually remains untranslated in our lives, including residues of violence, grief, outrage, and uncertainty. Although our integration (of mind, body, and spirit) is dependent upon our recognition of what silences and ails us, our larger U.S. society generally lacks the ceremonies and spaces to allow liminal states such as fear, shame, mourning, and anger. So I take them up in my work. "Fear of Ambivalence" and "Grandma" address fear and mourning, respectively, during my first trip to Viet Nam in 1999. My Cham grandmother's impending death motivated that particular visit, and my portraiture allowed me to memorialize my grandmother on her deathbed, the first time I met her, in service to the rest of the family who could not be present. I appreciate the respect not only for family, in Cham and Vietnamese cultures, but also for the sacred. "Tra Cang Monastery" near Phan Rang and "Boys' Cave," from one of the grotto sanctuaries in Marble Mountain, Đ à N ng, both portray young Vietnamese boys in sacred Buddhist spaces, at play and at rest. My Viet Nam series has allowed me to connect with my maternal family, and with my mother's home country, even when my words remain untranslatable.