Cultures collide in art museum exhibit
If you’re an American, chances are that everything (you think) you know about Vietnam comes from a war movie. But a new exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum aims to change that — and maybe to have a little fun with it, too.
A mix of video works and conceptual art objects, it’s a showcase for the Propeller Group, a creative collective based in Ho Chi Minh City but with roots in Los Angeles and around the world. It’s a provocative assemblage of work, but one that’s impossible to boil down to an elevator pitch.
One of the most striking works on display is “AK-47 vs. M16,” a series of transparent gelatin blocks, each capturing the violent collision of two bullets. Inspired by the (possibly apocryphal) story of two lead slugs that supposedly fused into one during a battle in the Civil War, the images are fascinating from both an aesthetic and a scientific point of view.
That installation also grew out of a feature film the Propeller Group produced that assembles clips from war movies and documentaries to create a narrative where the favored weapons of the U.S. Army and its Communist foes are elevated to protagonist status.
“We explore the extreme binaries,” explains founding member Tuan Andrew Nguyen. “We’re really intrigued by those in between spaces, like the space between communism and capitalism, or the overlap between them.”
Nguyen was born in Vietnam but grew up in the United States. His collaborators are Phunam (one name only), a French national who grew up in Singapore, and Matt Lucero, an American whom Nguyen met while the two were students at the California Institute of the Arts. All three have a background in graffiti and street art along with video and film production.
The clash between communism and global capitalism in Vietnam is a theme running through the exhibition. Or maybe “mashup” would be a better word than “clash.”
Lucero recalls arriving in Vietnam in 2009 for his first collaboration with Nguyen and Phunam.
“I landed in Ho Chi Minh City, and I saw the Ho Chi Minh posters, the hammer and sickle, this iconography that’s old but still being used. And it was everywhere, like advertising,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Wow, this is a communist country.’ And then in the city center, there was Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana and everything that you see everywhere in the world. And that was a realization that the global economy is implanting itself and changing how things work. It’s certainly changed the culture in Vietnam.”