The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Hanoi is a city of contrasts. While retaining a portion of its French colonial architecture, its colourful edifices sit side-by-side with charmless high-rise buildings. Tree-lined streets are alive with activity, the whirr of motorbikes is constant, and the scent of petrol hangs heavy in the air. In a city expanding outwards and upwards, surfaces are increasingly marked by Western popular culture, a sign of doi moi (restoration), the ‘open door’ policy that heralded Vietnam’s move towards a free market in the mid 1980s. 1 MTV is now on high volume in many restaurants, and Yanni’s dulcet tones offer a backing track to the click-clack of cyber café keyboards. Nguyen Minh Phuoc’s art is an open-ended address to the realities of contemporary Vietnam. He has made a number of works exploring points of disjuncture — between rural and urban, public and private, individual and collective — to examine how the meaning of tradition is becoming increasingly blurred. He often focuses on the city as a site of connection and disconnection, and his works are couched in cultural and political realities. The study of time and the human condition are constant elements, and, like other works in his oeuvre, Red étude ( Khuc Luyen Do ) 2009 uncovers continuities with the past, while at the same time locating them firmly in the conundrums of the present. The ‘red’ of the title is meaningful. In Vietnam, the colour has traditionally been used to denote long life, but more recently has been associated with communist ideology. Nguyen has made a study of these disparate meanings, embodied within the gestures of his central protagonist — an elderly woman moving through the fluid choreography of a Tai Chi sequence. Dressed in a military uniform, the symbolic garb of control, she holds a pair of vivid red fans, which she uses to weave a lyrical succession of movements with her body. Originating in China, Tai Chi is both martial art and meditation, a therapeutic discipline facilitating the flow of energy through the body. For the practitioner, meaning and effect exist in the gesture itself, though Nguyen’s portrayal is complicated by the fact that his stern- faced subject is dressed in crisp khaki. Does she represent Vietnam’s ageing military elite, who have long since exchanged pistols for pens? Or does this fan dancer simply represent a response to the new materialism of Vietnam, clinging to an ideology at odds both with the pace of change and with traditional affirmations of the sacredness of life? By placing the focus squarely on a single figure, the artist also explores the body as a site of personal experience. Red étude is an exercise in contrast: mesmeric movements are juxtaposed with the messy realism apparent in the disconnected series of black-and-white images appearing and disappearing behind her back. Each grainy picture offers a snapshot of everyday street scenes and urban rituals conveying the tempo of life in Hanoi. Photojournalistic in style, they appear at first glance as a straightforward procession of images depicting the Hanoi streetscape as a site of commerce, transit and social interaction. Closer observance reveals a preoccupation with moments of transition — a man napping in a hammock, motorists poised for take-off at a busy intersection, a haircut. Nguyen deftly captures the mood and character of a moment – each scene is thoughtfully composed, alive to small details and subtle shifts in natural light. Lingering camerawork eases us into the limpid pace of what is unfolding onscreen. Using stillness and slowness, Nguyen cuts up and reassembles time signatures: the fast-paced flow of reality is stretched and compressed, offering a space of quiet contemplation both on the present moment and on the continuum of time. The artist unites the spatial, embodied experience of his uniformed Tai Chi practitioner with a series of moments unfolding on the street. The visual landscape of Red étude is never static: instead it shifts purposefully between cohesion and discord — relating to the experience of negotiating public space and to the finely calibrated systems of control, both implicit and explicit, in urban life. The streets of Hanoi are spaces where life is staged. It is movement, the physical negotiation of space in the public realm, that ‘allows us to sense ourselves, to be grounded somewhere — in our physicality — within and in connection to the myriad relationships, connections and contested space of the contemporary world’. 2 Combining small, personal moments with overtly political gestures, Red étude asks questions — about the individual and the collective, about ideology and tradition, and about the embodied experience of living in a busy city. Yet, nowhere does Nguyen Minh Phuoc offer definitive answers; his camera simply presents the contradictions and complications of Vietnamese life onscreen as visual poetry. Bree Richards 1 Joe Fyfe, ‘Report from Hanoi: Making it new’, Art in America , vol.91. no.10. October 2003, p.81. 2 Lizzy Le Quesne, ‘The reach for presence’, Afterall , December 2010, <http://www.afterall.org/online/the-reach-for-presence/ >, viewed 13 July 2012. NGUYEN MINH PHUOC Red étude 166