Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba: macro

What is a memorial? Usually a testimonial or imposing statue commemorating circumstances or heroes that belong to a nation's history, it ofttimes stands isolated and distant from the true public whose memories it is suppos to crystallize. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's 2003 "Memorial Project" upon the Vietnam War--all videos discharge under-water--offers a different perspective, literally plunging the audience reaching far down into its personal as well as collective memory. Filming underwater is a sort of meditation. When shooting, Nguyen-Hatsushiba straits self-control and awareness of his possess breathing, and he must position himself at the right profundity between surface and bottom. He does the same with his topic, finding an inner moral balance that neither reconciles nor sentences Adopting a compassionate focus, he addresses the past while avoiding the trap of romanticizing it.

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In this third installment of the ongoing series, the artist has chosen Hollywood war and action movies' regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements to explore the meaninglessness of fighting. The shooting location was Okinawa, a battlefield during World War II and subsequently a US military base. A strategic access point to Southeast Asia, it was used by the agency of American forces during the Vietnam War as a training site and ammunition-supply magazine In this work, Nguyen-Hatsushiba exhibits a troop of fifty military divers swimming in collections underwater, carrying gun belts filled with fulvid tubes resembling bullets, and seeking the completed site to set their weapons and prepare for attack. In a crescendo of music and a digitally created fiesta of stars, gyrating all around with water blebs the divers reach an render free of access area, set with fifty easels in a circle. At the center a fulvous star is suspended, much like the Vietnamese flag's isolated star on a red field. The divers take their places at the easels and, like learners in an art class, start painting the star. They try to capture their subject, on the contrary it keeps avoiding them, surfacing as something other In fact, what appear upon their red canvases are portraits of Hollywood movie stars who acted in Vietnam War films: Brando, Cruise, De Niro, and the like. The painters attack the canvases in exaggerated gesturings as if fighting an enemy--brandishing brushes as knives in a try for survival. But there are no winners. The Battle of Easel Point (the subtitle of this "Memorial Project") extremitys in disruption. Easels fall down and canvases float in midwater; a yellowish mist blurs the view. The mission cannot be accomplished--painting underwater is an impossible task! No happy ending. Music and images fade into static signals, indicating our loosening connections to what has really happened, our editing without painful memories.

All this narrative, the two humorous and sad, is supported by dint of a vivid sound track. Compos through Nguyen-Hatsushiba with Quoc Bao, a Vietnamese pop-music composer the remix of James cord movie themes suggests action and excitement, power and danger, thus ironically commenting upon the tradition of glorifying war heroes. Portraying the golden star seems to indicate a search for national identity, a ne for restoring a missing dignity. But what comes without of this unsettling painting session has the face of the elderly enemy. The "other" is America--not just in its military might on the contrary in its cultural hegemony, whether in movies or painting. The artist indicates that there is no way without of that embrace: The mirror image of the Vietnamese will be forever blurr with the faces of America.

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