on the occasion of “how i miss the taste of tangerine”,a site-specific and video installation by Xuân HạSàn Art, March 2019

n g u y ễ n - h o à n g q u y ê n

[ T i ế n g V i ệ t ]

D A Y D R E A M F R O M E L S E W H E R E1 . F U T U R E - P E R F E C T W A S T E L A N D

Set in Gwangju in the fictional year 2080 when most of the human race have relocated to Mars, Xuân Hạ’s video installation forecasts an evacuated city where a pregnant protagonist wanders alone through a stream of abandoned locations and objects: forlorn crossroads, monuments, gravestones, Buddhist figurines, photographic portraits of Gwangju’s first Christian missionaries, a deserted memorial park dedicated to the martyrs of the May 18 Democratization Movement. The landmarks carry memories of conflicts and ideologies that are utterly specific to South Korea and simultaneously nameless in Xuân Hạ’s imagined space-time, where places and images of remembrance swirl in oblivion.

Meanwhile, on the other channel of the video installation, the same wanderer, now trapped inside a closed apartment, paces back and forth under the inspection of a figure wearing a white protective suit. Between the obscure wordless interactions between the two characters and an ominous TV broadcast about human exploration-colonization of outer space, the artist communicates the sense of a diseased, perhaps deceased, space on a future perfect exhausted Earth without relying on the Hollywood aesthetics of hard-edged cybernetics and holographic urbanscapes to generate a dystopian sci-fi picture.

2 . S U R V I V I N G T H E W H I T E C U B E

3 . D A Y D R E A M F R O M E L S E W H E R E

Replicating and physicalizing the menace of urban decay, Xuân Hạ transforms Sàn Art’s white cube into a site of dusty fantasy. She covers the floor space and furniture with the same translucent plastic sheets that occasionally envelop the corpse-like protagonist in the film. Shattered bricks, concrete fragments and dangling electricity wires extracted from the gallery walls and ceilings are all re-used as part of the installation. The barren atmosphere, which dims as the sun goes down due to reduced track lighting, looks prepared for a possibility of even more collapse and debris.

In this installation, the white cube not only serves as a location, address or supporting structure for the artworks but becomes as a medium to be tinkered with, taken apart and transmogrified. Inscribed with the ideology of Modernism, the white cube is now a global standard environment for the isolation and elevation of art, especially after the often-cited MoMA exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art” formally institutionalized the practice in 1936. The new Sàn Art space in Saigon, a humble white cube located in a labyrinthine high-rise condominium surrounded by soaring financial towers, surely doesn’t escape this regime of art displays. And yet, the gallery’s invitation for an artist to come perturb the normative whiteness, orderliness and cleanliness of the space, and by extension, temporarily interrupt the flow of art display and transaction, is a conscious decision to resist total commercialization and embrace an attitude of experimentation.

The title “how i miss the taste of tangerine” is born out of a personal memory of the artist-traveler. Thinking back on her residency in Gwangju, Xuân Hạ recalls a moment during her hike to the Mudeungsan peak, when she took a break and tasted a tangerine on the roadside, a transient encounter with the revelation of nature. Whereas the artworks intimate the compartmentalization and confinement of life on Earth, the titular presence of an absent scent offers viewers a reverie of refuge. Inside, and in spite of, the delirious rhythm of the urban milieu whose breathless recursion of boxed spaces relentlessly subdivides the world into rational frames within frames, the name of the installation recuperates a tenderness, a daydream radiating from elsewhere, as it summons a drifting vision of landscapes lost.

The title “how i miss the taste of tangerine” is born out of a personal memory of the artist-traveler. Thinking back on her residency in Gwangju, Xuân Hạ recalls a moment during her hike to the Mudeungsan peak, when she took a break and tasted a tangerine on the roadside, a transient encounter with the revelation of nature. Whereas the artworks intimate the compartmentalization and confinement of life on Earth, the titular presence of an absent scent offers viewers a reverie of refuge. Inside, and in spite of, the delirious rhythm of the urban milieu whose breathless recursion of boxed spaces relentlessly subdivides the world into rational frames within frames, the name of the installation recuperates a tenderness, a daydream radiating from elsewhere, as it summons a drifting vision of landscapes lost.

X U Â N H Ạ

Xuan Ha (b. 1993, Đà Nẵng), is a visual and multimedia artist. She has been an active practitioner in the local art community since the end of 2015, when she co-founded the art collective Chaos-downtown Cháo.

In her recent practice, Xuân Hạ reflects on questions around the direct and indirect impact of urbanization and industrialization on Millennial behavior, especially in Vietnam. Through various forms of experimenting with space, using fragments of daily material and manipulating moving images, she presents non-realistic scenarios by using loosely coupled pieces that tend to resist each other and allowing them to gradually give shape to a narrative. Her works are a set of documentation born out of an opposition between herself and the dizzying changes of her surrounding environment. Her practice is also a small and ordinary effort to make meaning according to personal perceptions.

In 2018, Xuan Ha participated in the ACC Arts Space Network Residency Program hosted by the Asia Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju, Korea and "FAMLAB: Film, Archive and Music Lab" in Gia Lai, Ninh Thuan, organized by the British Council, Vietnam. Xuan Ha's recent solo exhibitions include "There’s an ant inside my glass of water,” Chaosdowntown Cháo, Vietnam (2018) as part of the Asian In/Visible Station project series co-organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center and co-curated by ZeroStation, and “how i miss the taste of tangerine,” Sàn Art, Vietnam (2019).

X U Â N H Ạ

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