KVT – A River Flows through

KVT – A River Flows through

KVT-2012Exhibition Jo Ha Kyu 9

KVT immerses in a Tokyo journey

Film artist Nguyen Trinh Thi and photographic artist Jamie Maxtone-Graham have a very beautiful and poetic exhibition at the Japan Foundation Center for Cultural Exchange on the corner of Tan Hung Dao and Quang Trung.

Early last year the pair spent 6 weeks in Tokyo and ‘Jo Ha Kyu’ is the collaborative, artistic result.

Jo Ha Kyu is an old Japanese term that Thi and Jamie liken to a small stream expanding into a river which eventually becomes a waterfall that crashes into a still pond…a description that is visually vivid enough to imagine as the idea behind a traditional Haiku… before it is pruned into its perfect word picture.

Thi’s video art piece filigrees into exceptional visual haikus. Even the sound track is its own aural series of these poems.

The Jo Ha Kyu is followed through beautifully in this meditative art work as it opens with a low white noise that becomes an urban train with commuters sleeping and then hones on a child who leads us into a wide eyed meandering discovery of a city.

The child motif recurs throughout the film, perhaps allowing us to see the city in an uncomplicated, wondrous way…allowing it to unfold its prisms nonjudgmentally.

Exhibition Jo Ha Kyu 1

Exhibition Jo Ha Kyu 2

Exhibition Jo Ha Kyu 3

Exhibition Jo Ha Kyu 4

Exhibition Jo Ha Kyu 5

There’s a commencement to the Ha section of the piece that makes you gasp… when a bystander becomes the conductor of the action and we begin to have a big band score, reminiscently West Side Story, filter in and out playing accompaniment to the marvelous choreography of feet and legs and bodies…the river simile, I guess, that widens and flows, eddies, stalls, pushes and pulls and then rushes frenetically until it crashes into a very still and green treed denouement where the child seems to take us by the hand and lead us to a place to pause and allow reflection.

Those filigrees: the masks and faces (wonderful sequence). Tradition and modernity; youth and age; urban gloss and decay; concrete, glass and asphalt that spills suddenly into trees and moss and deep cool shadows; night and day.

The part featuring a china rabbit and the naked jumper is impossibly beautiful and the symbolism of the moon that becomes measured time is pure poetry.

The more I sat through the film, the more I got softly enmeshed in its silken threads that weave and spill pleasantly through your mind.

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