Workshop: immaterial intimacies: XXX-mas Artist on Artist Special

Workshop: immaterial intimacies: XXX-mas Artist on Artist Special

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Thurs 22 Dec 2022, 05 pm – 07 pm
Sàn Art
Units B6.16 and B6.17, 6th Floor, Block B Office, Millennium Masteri
Ward 6, District 4, HCMC
Registration link

From the organizer:

Through material investigations, Bruce Yonemoto and Việt Lê explore immaterial realms, divining queer hopeful poetics. Through their individual collaborations with spirit mediums, artisans, and local Vietnamese community members, the artists challenge the limits of Cartesian bodies of knowledge, geopolitical boundaries, as well as postcolonial intimacies.

Both artists evoke time-honored rituals as well as transcendent practices for times of crisis. For instance, Yonemoto uses lacquer—common in Japan and Việt Nam—to disrupt dyads between East and West, materialism and the spirit, the mundane and high art. Through a stunning large-scale black obsidian installation, Yonemoto calls upon divination practice: a commentary on mediumship and mass media as mirror and void. Using experimental film as a medium, Lê’s genre-bending video installation is a hybrid musical documentary combining interviews and animations to trace a portrait of an iconic nhạc vàng “golden music” singer. Extending gold as metaphor, Lê’s performative use of smoke, cutting, and gold leaf leaves paintings references Gutai’s discrepant lineages of movement and modernity.

Together the two artists call forth the art of mediumship using different art media (paintings, video, installation, performance), leaving traces, songs, ladders as remnants–conjuring returns and revenants.

About speakers:

Việt Lê

Việt Lê is an academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr. Lê, Associate professor at California College of the Arts, is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, 2021). The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with Latipa (Sming Sming Books, 2019, second edition) is in the collections of the Guggenheim, Victoria and Albert Museum, SF MOMA, among others.

Lê has presented his work at The Banff Centre, Bangkok Art & Cultural Center, Shanghai Biennale, Rio Gay Film Festival, and the Smithsonian, among other venues. Lê curated Charlie Don’t Surf! (Centre A, Vancouver, BC, 2005); and co-curated humor us (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, CA, 2008), transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix (with Yong Soon Min: ARKO, Seoul; Galerie Quynh, Sài Gòn; UC Irvine Gallery; YBCA, San Francisco, 2008-09) and the 2012 Kuandu Biennale (Taipei) and the 2022 Viet Film Fest, “the world’s largest Vietnamese international film festival,” with a special screening and Q&A with Trinh T. Minh-ha. A board member of the Queer Cultural Center and Art Matters, Lê is 2022 Stanford Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) Mellon Arts Fellow, a ’22-24 Headlands Bay Area Fellow, and is a Visiting Scholar at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Bruce Yonemoto

Bruce Yonemoto was raised in Santa Clara Valley (now Silicon Valley) as the son of Japanese Americans interned during WWII by the American government. His work is informed by his family’s history of racial discrimination and forced incarceration. His work as a video and digital installation artist, educator, writer, and curator (many of the works done in collaboration with his brother, Norman) began in the mid-1970s. The body of single-channel video artwork was created from 1976 to the late 1980s examined the effects of the mass media on our perceptions of personal identity (psychoanalytical, sexual, ethnic, and political), romantic love, melodramas and soap operas to TV commercials and media critique (the ultimate products of Hollywood’s search for audience identification and manipulation), desired to manipulate audiences while making them aware of that manipulation. Since 1989, his solo work has been exploring experimental cinema and video art within the context of installation, photography, and sculpture. An important part of Yonemoto’s development as an artist came from doing post-graduate work in Tokyo in the early 70s, which helped form his sense of identity and purpose.

For the last 5 years, his work was presented in over 30 separate venues including major retrospectives at Anthology Film Forum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany, and solo presentations internationally, Manila, Mexico City, and Taipei. His archives are being acquired by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Gallery, New York, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City, and his work was featured in Los Angeles 1955-85 at the Pompidou Center, Paris, and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, the 2008 Gwangju Biennial. Pacific Standard Time, Getty Research Center, and most recently an expansive survey show in Kanazawa, Japan. He was also the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

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