HCMC – Artist’s Talk by Nguyen Manh Hung & Jompet Kuswidananto

Wed 29 May 2013, 6.30 pm
San Art

From San Art:

You are invited to an artist talk by Nguyen Manh Hung and Jompet Kuswidananto.

Over the past month, Hung and Jompet have spent time together discussing their individual art practices and interests. They both realized they have an interest in the idea of ghosts as mythical presences that can reveal the past, but also as social symbols that have become lost tools who have forgotten their purpose.

On Wednesday they will speak of their individual practice and conclude by sharing how their mutual fascination for the ‘ghost’ has taken new perspective over their last one month of discussion.

Jompet is a visual artist from Yogyarkarta, Indonesia whose interest in theatre and music has contributed to an artistic practice largely inspired by the re-discovery of cultural historical texts. In much of his work, the idea of a ghost as a forgotten memory or haunting social presence has given birth to kinetic installations where symbols such as military costume come alive with sound and light.

Nguyen Manh Hung is a visual artist from Hanoi (currently based in Ho Chi Minh City) whose playful manipulation of scale and perspective has become a signature trait in his paintings and installations. Hung’s work references the tools of industrialized society in Vietnam – such as war tanks, collective housing; and aeroplanes to name but a few – examining their relevance and meaning today.

Jompet Kuswidananto and Nguyen Manh Hung are the first artists to take part in ‘Prod/Ponder’, the artist-in-collaboration program as part of ‘Conscious Realities’, a 3 year initiative bringing a cross range of interdisciplinary artists and thinkers from South East Asia, South Asia, Latin America and Africa to Vietnam.