bugs, birds.. equations of the future

about

bugs, birds..

equations of the future

a duo show by Lê Hiền Minh and Cam Xanh

Exhibition Dates: October 13th 2017 – January 5th 2018

Opening Reception: Friday, October 13th from 6:00pm – 9:00pm

L = L = L =

What does L equal? L = life, L = love, L = liberty, laughter, loss, language, legacy… By leaving the end of the equation blank, the audience is asked to decide what L might mean to them. That L also equals L only emphasises how there is not one correct answer – there is no hegemony in this world of the future. These ideas represent the two central themes of the duo exhibition between Cam Xanh and Lê Hiền Minh: freedom and femininity.

In Vietnamese, L could also refer to Lai (moths) which are nocturnal insects similar to butterflies. Put together, the silkworms contributed by Cam Xanh and the sculptural worms and birds produced by Lê Hiền Minh create their own bug and bird story, whilst simultaneously retaining their autonomy as artworks by their separate installations. Cam Xanh’s performance occurs in its own cocoon – drapes of sheer white cloth enclosing both the audience and artist in a soft, womb-like room. A comforting yet confining space, the silkworms cannot escape their perimeters, just as they are unable to free themselves from their role as silk producers. Audience like artist are complicit in the stunting of these worms’ lifecycles. The worm, with its feminine quality of the power to create, is confined to its single role that is manipulated to serve the economic goals of their owner. Their dream of flying stays merely a dream, a baited promise.

Lê Hiền Minh’s worms are similarly captured, dangling from a single tense, taught rope, hanging in a net from which the oversized worms seem to attempting to free themselves. The worms bulge, twisted as if in pain and crushed together, unable to escape from their suspended prison, weighted down by a stone statue. The statue is inspired by ancient sculptures of women that date back to as early as 25,000 BCE. Historically contextualised, the stone woman subsequently becomes an emblem for all the women that have succeeded her. The burden she carries becomes the burden of the female role in society: traditionally to be pure for marriage, to be a good wife, to make a baby, but now also to have a successful career, to make money, to fulfil all the expectations of this role. History and tradition are both inescapable for her and yet something she holds on to. The worms embody this inner turmoil, whilst the rope reveals the tension between our individual desires and external pressures.

Lê Hiền Minh’s birds fill the remaining gallery space, over five hundred individual sculptures almost identical to each other. Like an army they are poised ready, protective of the worm populations who are confined by the borders of walls, ceilings and nets equally as unnatural as the geopolitical boundaries that define countries. But natural law would see birds eating bugs; the story the exhibition tells is one that contradicts nature’s law. And so things are not quite as they seem: what appears soft is hard and vice versa. Lê Hiền Minh’s birds cannot fly and look weighty like stone yet, made from Vietnamese Dó paper, are as light as the feathers they don’t have. Cam Xanh’s installation of live silkworms meanwhile, sees moths emerging from one cocoon into another; though they have the flight Lê Hiền Minh’s birds are denied, freedom becomes an unrealised dream, a false promise from their sovereign artist.

Separated, each artwork poses a question of identity for its respective artist. The birds handmade by Lê Hiền Minh connote freedom and peace, despite their military style gathering. They sit together as a picture of unity, facing forward, ready for flight, but whether that is a flight to freedom or to fight we cannot know. The cause for their creation is less than peaceful and stems from a deep unrest within the artist who compares herself to a migrating bird. Born in the north of Vietnam only to grow up in the south makes her alien to those in both parts, a feeling only compounded by her experiences in the USA where she finds herself identifying strongly as Vietnamese yet unable to fit the traditional role of a Vietnamese woman. Identity in Lê Hiền Minh’s work is ultimately problematic and not fully knowable: there is not just one version of our self to know, just as there is not just one bird to be seen, nor a single understanding of what it means to be a woman. Her army of birds stand like herself, opposed to being forced into one meaning.

Cam Xanh’s silkworms likewise have been a recurring motif in her works as the animal she identifies most with, a feeling undeterred by her acute phobia of the creature. The exhibition is her first use of live silkworms—an act that brings the idea of casualties and mass violence to the forefront of the piece as cocoons and moths litter the room like fallen bodies in a war zone. Her performance is an act of meditation on the possibilities in life: 10,000 plus silk cocoons each inscribed with ‘L =’. The live silkworms continue to spin in their cocoons, just as Cam Xanh continues to write, both dreaming of transformation and flight. The symbolic possibility of freedom usually represented by a window is undone by the opaque blackness of the three ‘windows’ the cocoons seem to tumble from. Again, nothing is quite as it seems. Perhaps, Cam Xanh suggests, we are only meant to conceive the idea of freedom and should recognise it as an unliveable ideology, an unattainable possibility. Peering into the darkness of the windows, we cannot know what is outside, just as we cannot fully know what freedom is or if we ourselves are free.

Instead of absolute knowledge, both artists offer us the freedom to wonder…

L = L = L =

Cam Xanh’s cocoon installation is the first in MoT+++’s experimental series. The cocoon is a reoccurring symbol in the artist’s oeuvre that stems from her childhood experiences and intense silkworm phobia, but this is the first time she will work with the animal in all stages of its lifecycle development. The project has no closing date, so the room will be a place for visitors to observe the worm- to-moth transition for as long as possible. The installation is part of an innovative new project from the gallery that plans to foster more experimental works.

The exhibition follows ‘Home | Land’, a project by Lê Hiền Minh and Cam Xanh at Taiwan Annual Art Fair in September 2017.

About artists:

Lê Hiền Minh is a female artist who was born in 1979 in Hanoi and grew up in Ho Chi Minh City. She studied traditional lacquer painting at the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Art University, then transferred to and graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, USA, majoring in Fine Art. Today, Le Hien Minh lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.

Lê Hiền Minh utilizes a traditional Vietnamese handmade paper called Dó paper as her central medium. Using this material she creates large scale site specific installations.

Lê Hiền Minh, through her use of Dó Paper, offers a new perspective on a traditional Vietnamese material. In Lê Hiền Minh’s work, Dó paper acts as a bridge between contemporary and traditional Vietnamese art as well as between modern and historical Vietnamese culture.

Cam Xanh (real name: Tran Thanh Ha, b.1977) is a conceptual artist from Vietnam based in Ho Chi Minh City. She co-founded the Post Vidai Collection – the first collection dedicated to contemporary Vietnamese art – in 2004 and has acted as its Director / Curator since then. In 2014 she co-founded the Dia Projects gallery with contemporary visual artist Richard Streitmatter-Tran, and is the current Curator of the space. She began making art in 2012 under the pseudonym Cam Xanh and has exhibited internationally in both South Korea and Vietnam. Her artist name Cam Xanh, which translates as Green Orange, exemplifies the minimalist and playful nature of her works.