KVT – A Nice Journey to Here and NOWHERE

KVT somewhat involved somewhere near here with artists now here

Monday, as an art viewing day, was really interesting, even invigorating.

I dropped into NOWHERE and found myself enjoying myself at The Japan Foundation Center for international Exchange at 27 Quang Trung.

Two emerging Japanese artists were sponsored to come to Hanoi and make fairly immediate art alongside exciting Hanoian artist Tuan Mami, who has just returned from a reciprocal art journey in Japan.

So what do you finally come up with after a couple of weeks’ immersion in a strange and different culture? Easy for Tuan because he’s been immersed here for years! But how to exhibit something simpatico with the visitors?

It was perhaps inevitable that one would be drawn into Hanoi’s noise! Mamoru Okuno (34) has done the inevitable…. but in a way that beats just about all myriad attempts that myriad visitors listening to our cacaphony have presented in the past.

He has a BA in Fine Arts (Music Performance) so you realize that he’ll do something pretty nice.

Okuno treats the incessant growl of internal combustion engines and the incessant chorusing of horns, as white noise and asks us to listen to the sounds that somehow rise above and through it all and filter into our ears. In his notes he mentions the tiny cracking sound of sunflower seeds being cracked by gossipers at a sidewalk café as traffic grumbles past outside. Very nice!

Now anyone who has that type of sensitivity wins me over straight away and I was in accord with his installations even before I saw them.

In one gallery room he has hung a row of metal coat hangers close together and then turned two fans to face them so that the music they make trills above the outside motorbike rumble. In the courtyard, the parade of wire hangers are extended in a line so that any breeze will catch them and the add a ting, or an etude – as he calls his installation – to the listener’s ear.

In a covered porch he has installed what I call his Pandora’s Boxes. He’s gone to Tin Street in the Old Quarter and had some replica tin boxes made….like those in which university students keep their treasures and clothes safe and secure in shared dorms. Each is on a plinth, displayed like a treasure chest

and on each lid is engraved the words ‘What I Hear’.

You open one chest and find some ear plugs (sterile of course) and you are invited to insert them into the correct orifices and then open another chest and let the sounds inside fly around your head. Mind you, the sounds are written on a notebook page, so really it’s our aural imaginations we are asked to use. A clever but difficult exercise.

Be really nice if the sounds released from his Pandora’s collection would escape and continually float around us, ready to be snatched at will whenever the noises of traffic and construction become all too overbearing.

Motoyuki Shitamichi (33) became engrossed in Hanoi’s bridges. First he starts with a nice little lyrical video presentation of vehicles crossing Long Bien Bridge as darkness falls at 6pm and the rush hour is in full swing (easy to miss as it has to be viewed through a closed glass door). A brief history of his research starts with a map that shows his route from Long Bien and into the alley mazed suburbs

and nearby a motley collection of things he borrowed.

Its not till you come to a nearly hidden doorway around a corner that you realize the delightful method in his delightful madness and the delightful bridges that are the his final photographic installation….with some shown here.

Tuan Mami (30) has set up a wall of ephemeral moments made into captured images. It’s called ‘Celebration of Our Moment and Love’ and features a parade of small, framed photographs along a wall, each accompanied by pertinent text from a player in each scene. Tuan says that he is talking, amongst other things, about the fragility of life, its ephemeral moments, its brokenness, and the way that relationships between people disappear. It needs time and effort to transverse and digest its length, but it is poignantly worthwhile. As a visual presentation, it works well too.

Our lives and relationships are, nowadays, momentarily caught in digital images that are then thrown into the dark ether of internet forgetfulness and become ephemeral moments never to be captured and turned into historical records. The words that make up our relationships are also too easily deleted with nary a retrievable fragment …..sad really!

Thanks Japan…a great exchange of ideas! Its also interesting to read the blog by one of the Japanese artists on the Grapevine.