MAP 2023 | Làm thế nào để ta truyền đạt chuyển động? Một thảo luận của Jieon Lee | How do we communicate mobility? In Dialogue with Jieon Lee

Trong phần hỏi đáp của buổi nói chuyện, tôi nhìn quanh phòng chiếu ba bau AIR cũng như tên của các khán giả trên Zoom. Những gương mặt – cả thực và ảo – tham dự buổi diễn thuyết này đến từ Việt Nam – không chỉ Hà Nội –, Hàn Quốc, Thụy Sĩ, Đức, Pháp, Scotland, Mỹ… Tôi nhớ đến một mục đích cốt lõi của MAP: trao đổi văn hóa. Mục đích của Heritage Space khi làm việc đó rõ ràng không phải là trao đổi văn hóa theo cách hiểu truyền thống về quyền lực mềm mang tính ngoại giao; thậm chí nó còn không phải đơn thuần là tìm hiểu về một nền văn hóa khác. Đúng hơn, MAP mô tả trao đổi văn hóa như một thứ ngôn ngữ phổ quát cho phép chúng ta hiểu cách mà một người với một nền tảng khác ta nhìn nhận thế giới, từ đó tác động đến cách chính chúng ta tiếp nhận thế giới cũng như hiểu về thực tại và bản sắc của mình ở quê nhà. Đó là lý do tại sao tôi lại mở đầu bằng mẩu chuyện có vẻ tầm thường của riêng mình: bài giảng của Jieon đã thay đổi cái nhìn của tôi về sự tự thể hiện ở quy mô vô cùng cá nhân, ở một mức độ mà cho đến nay tôi chưa từng gặp. Nó cũng khiến tôi suy ngẫm về thực trạng nghệ thuật đương đại ở quê nhà, nơi chủ đề về sự tự chủ trong nghệ thuật ngoài lề là hướng đi mà các cuộc trò chuyện nghệ thuật hiện đang tiến đến. Xét cho cùng, chuyển động theo định nghĩa là “một khả năng”, bằng chứng về một vật thể di động. Mặc dù đây hoàn toàn không phải là quan điểm rõ ràng trong tác phẩm của Yumin Lee hay trong bài giảng của Jieon, cả hai đã dễ dàng làm sáng tỏ những khả năng sáng tạo có được từ việc xem xét lại một cách cận cảnh sự chuyển động. Tôi muốn nghĩ đến những cách mà các nghệ sĩ tôi biết ở Los Angeles sẽ phản ứng với thực hành khắc họa nghệ thuật mới mẻ này.

How do we communicate mobility? In Dialogue with Jieon Lee

A writing response of Caroline Levin on the lecture of curator Jieon Lee in MAP 2023

Since I arrived in Vietnam in August, I’ve been saying that I wanted to get back into painting. So, this morning I decided: today is the day. I went to an art shop by my apartment off of Tran Vu. I’d like to disclaim that I am by zero means a self-proclaimed artist. The practice feeds my battery like few things can, and you know what, given I’m self-taught, my ego notes that I am not mortifyingly bad. I entered the shop with a set list: the cheapest acrylic set, a 40x60 canvas, four paint brushes more or less. I went to the paint selection and stumbled upon a dilemma my psyche had not ever previously encountered:  do I go for acrylic … or do I try oil? After ten minutes of googling the criteria for whether I was eligible for the baby upgrade, I swept the thought into the backlog. I redirected myself to the canvases. And yet, once again, I found my decisiveness… frozen. I had my list in hand, well-aware of the usual subject matter and medium I initially had in mind: bare female horse with mild surrealist touch; acrylic; canvas. To those who know me, the naked lady with either flowers sprouting out of her head, or butterflies resting on her collarbone, or eggs instead of nipples has been my signature for the last 5 years — from Los Angeles, to Reims, to Paris, to San Francisco. While my carbon emissions skyrocketed, my brush stroke did not move an inch. And yet, here in this Japanese-run art shop hidden on the 3rd floor of some apartment complex in Hanoi, I found myself incapable of purchasing the usual ingredients. My thoughts were marinating a stew that smelled crazily unfamiliar.

This article is not about my trivial quarter-life-wannabe-artist-crisis. It is a critical assessment of South Korean curator Jieon Lee’s recent lecture for MAP 2023, hosted by Hanoian art initiative Heritage Space. As unobvious as it seems upon an introductory read, the two are fully interconnected. When Heritage’s artistic director Nguyen Anh Tuan first told me that “Mobility” was the central theme for this year’s Mapping Art Project, I gawked in excitement. I ‘gawked’ with minimal consideration for the potential aesthetic takes on this central concept but more so at the very word: “concept”. I instantly imagined photo essays on the 6.5 motorbikes that characterize Hanoi as a perpetually moving landscape; or visual testimonies of Vietnam’s umpteenth migratory movements.  My mind engaged with “mobility” solely on a level of subject matter — the object that the artist chooses to represent regardless of the means through which they do so. Perhaps this can be explained from a California background where a big emphasis in contemporary arts discourse is on the topic of representation. Who/ what do we see on the canvas/screen? Is it representative of our society or rather speaking to the narrative of a privileged few? I admit to often giving little priority to the medium above the message, maybe due to an internalized disdain for the elitism of the fine arts world as I encountered it in France. What good is a polished artistic practice if the average person cannot find a way to engage with it? 

Jieon’s lecture struck a different chord. Presenting her lecture as not in fact a lecture, but, an experiment, she introduced her curatorial practice as a convergence of science-fiction imagery with commentary on a “new normality”. Her contribution to MAP 2023 seeks to expand our very understanding of mobility, not merely treating it as “a physical movement from one border to another” or “to cross geographical boundaries”. She paints the backdrop of South Korea’s rapidly socio-economic changes: with rising infrastructure, ever growing technology, and new forms of overarching power structures, mobility as a system in which everyday people partake is being challenged, re-configured, re-interpreted and thus re-negotiated at a similar pace. How does one make sense of it? Jieon suggests broadening how we frame the conversation itself, broadening our lens of analysis, “stepping into mobility itself” rather than observing it from the outside. She mobilizes the strategy of the contemporary mobile in South Korea entitled “CASE” – an acronym for “connected, autonomous, shared, electric” – to characterize a framework not just into reading literal mobility but equally in interpreting the “now” of the country’s growing contemporary arts scene. By expanding our understanding of mobility, Jieon demonstrates how can treat the term not just as some abstract concept but rather as a medium in itself. In doing so, we uncover a capacity to bridge different temporalities and geographies as well as the new contemporary paradigm of multiple realities – “real world” along with that of the virtual. 

As I thought over the works Jieon introduced to her Ba Bau/ Zoom audience, the piece that became anchored in my mind was that of South Korean artist Yumin Lee: “Ghost Player”. I typically take little interest in anything tangential to AI or new-tech oriented art – I proclaim the human world as superiorly fascinating, the virtual world as capitalist dystopia. Lee’s work managed to strike a different chord. The artist attached 60 micro lenses to her entire body, filmed what her body saw in the world, and projected an end result sci-fi-esque video installation of a bunch of edited moving images. With a chaotic cacophony of visuals and sound layered on top of one another, the work is chaotic, uncomfortable, difficult to detect concrete images, and the tempo is marked by an omnipresent basketball dribble. As Jieon puts it, the work conveys “a mobility experiment to escape from reality, and virtuality that tries to escape by adding senses to others.” The video’s installation comes as two digital sculptures that enclose the spectator, transforming them into a fugitive of sorts as they are forced to enter in between the screens and feel the claustrophobic uneasiness of the work on a multi-sensorial scale.

Jieon treats this work as an exemplification of one axis of her curatorial practice:  “the body as a medium” – intrinsic to her thesis of mobility as a system and thus similarly potential medium. The words echoed a direct quote of Serbian artist, Marina Abramovic – the mother of performance art. Abramovic’s own doctrine is this very phrasing: “the body as a medium” . In an interview in May 2010, the Serbian performer expressed: “I could never go back to the seclusion of the studio and be protected by the space there. The only way of expression is to perform.” Performance art, as Abramovic defines it, holds an emancipative quality that is often irreplicable on the canvas. Yumin Lee transcends this philosophy, using the body as means of conveying what it lives, how it lives it, through senses that the spectator can holistically feel. Again, to note that this work was shown in link with the theme of mobility. How do we express how we move through the world and thus make sense of it – through space, time, realities… ever-evolving normalities. Things everyday discourse could never adequately put to words. Art fills this void. 

During the Q&A portion of the talk, I looked around the Ba Bau projection room as well as at the names of the zoom audience. The faces – both real and virtual -- attending this lecture came from Vietnam – not solely Hanoi --, South Korea, Switzerland, Germany, France, Scotland, the US… I was reminded of a pillar of MAP: cultural exchange. The purpose of such for Heritage is evidently not cultural exchange in its traditional sense of diplomatic soft power; nor is it even in simply learning facts about another culture. Rather, MAP characterizes cultural exchange as a universal language that allows us to understand how someone with a different background from our own sees the world, in turn impacting how we see it ourselves and how we make sense of our realities and identities back home. Hence why I opened with my own seemingly trivial micro scale anecdote: Jieon’s lecture altered my lens on self-expression on a highly personal scale, to a degree I had not encountered to date. It also triggered me to reflect on the contemporary arts scene back home where this topic of agency being conveyed in marginalized art is where the artistic conversation is currently oriented. After all, mobility is by definition “an agency”, proof of an active subject. Though this was by no means the explicit point of Yumin Lee’s work nor Jieon’s lecture, the two effortlessly shed a light on the creative possibilities that come from rethinking mobility on such a close-up scale. I like to think of how artists I know in Los Angeles would treat this alternative portrayal of artistic practice. 

So: How do we communicate mobility? 

According to Jieon, we treat it as a practice in itself. I would argue that this speaks to the regional context of cultural production and the burden East Asian contemporary arts finds itself facing:  how to challenge the status quo of the global art market still predominantly taking interest in decorative/ representational paintings of the beautiful distant East. Again, this is not at all the explicit intention of the work but rather a broader backdrop I keep in mind when engaging with the topics discussed in MAP and hence why this radical take on mobility x subjecthood holds an even more complex relevance. The questions provoked from Jieon’s talk equally held personal resonance, as you reader gathered in my mid-morning Tran Vu adjacent art shop meltdown. A piece that began to shift how I engaged with my pseudo-paintings was Venezuelan surrealist Lucita Hurtado’s “I am” series, intended as a powerful self-affirmation of the female artist. She paints her active body as she perceives with her own eyes directly looking down – the backdrops rotate from the carpet of her living room to sand dunes in the desert merged into her angled knee.  

As I write this, I imagine Hurtado seated amidst MAP 2023’s audience in Ba Bau Air’s library/ projection room, baffled all the while breath taken following Jieon’s introduction to Lee. She flies home to Los Angeles in her mobile aircraft, goes to a local camera shop, and purchases 70 lenses (artists and their competitive egos). “I am” no longer affirms Hurtado’s visual body in the confines of her living room. Surrealism begins to dance on the margins of science-fiction. She thanks Jieon for the creative possibilities. And she joyously experiments with the newly infinite mobilities.