Skylines with Flying People 4
Kinh Storage, Van Phuc Village, Hanoi 1 November – 31 January
On an early winter’s day, two members of The Appendix Group – a collective of performance artists who here act as exhibition curators – lead me to a warehouse on the outskirts of Hanoi to view Skylines with Flying People 4. This is the fourth series in a programme initiated in 2010 by Nhà Sàn Collective, its name referencing a verse by the late poet Tran Dan. The experience of being in the physical presence of some 20 artworks jolts me from a digital-data-haunted slump.
Never before has the digital documentation of art been so necessary and useful as it is now, even though it completely alters our perception of an artwork’s form. Just over a year ago, the digitisation of art functioned as mere simulation, a temporary replication existing mostly for research. Now, digitised data routinely replaces its physical entity. From individual artworks to entire exhibitions to the ‘viewing rooms’ promoted by art fairs, art has become pure data, to be digitally reproduced and looped on our screens. This shift has helped maintain the trading of art as a commodity: artworks travel directly from studio to warehouse without the need for in-person viewing.
In Skylines 4, The Appendix Group does not conceal the commodified nature of art, and in fact explores that very subject in its selection and display of artworks. Vuðu ˜ c Toàn and
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Nguyen Huy An, two of the group’s six members, invited artists to participate under a set of strict rules: each artwork has to be displayed within a securely locked storage compartment measuring 130cm on a side. Exhibitiongoers can only visit in small groups, with prior registration mandatory. The Appendix Group and a stockkeeper lead the 90-minute tour, where stealth is key to avoiding raising the suspicions of the warehouse owner. Much like an art tour, the viewer looks at the works while listening to explanations from the curator. At the same time, on security cameras, the warehouse owner sees a group of clients assessing goods for purchase: a link in the chain of production–commerce. ‘The client’ is a shell that shields ‘the guerrilla art viewer’, pushing those on the art tours into a voluntary performance – one in which, according to the curatorial statement, ‘a skyline is revealed where oppression prevails’. If Tran Dan’s original verse ‘skylines without flying people’ is a reference to the days when the poet and his peers in the Nhân Va˘n Giai Pham movement were mu¡ed by house arrest, Nhà Sàn Collective and The Appendix Group’s change of preposition to ‘with’ reflects the more hopeful spirit of current times, when art events may find ways to transcend the fear of censorship.
Care and custody are at the heart of The
~ Appendix Group’s approach here. In Nguyen Va˘n Phúc’s The leaves of thorny bamboo and the spatial shift (2020), we are witnessing, we are told by our guides, a deep a¥ection between friends – that is, between the curators who proposed the materialisation of the artwork and the artist whose unrealised and forgotten idea it was. The work itself explores themes of care and custody: the artist has collected bamboo leaves from around Hanoi’s Ho Chi
Minh Mausoleum – a risky endeavour given the constant, watchful eye of soldiers guarding the national symbol – and placed them in a glass box, which he has then sealed shut. While Uncle Ho’s corpse lies intact within its glass co¨n inside the mausoleum, the green bamboo leaves emit vapour, wilt, disintegrate and grow mouldy in their box inside the warehouse storage unit.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, duties of care and custody have required that The Appendix Group sacrifice aspects of artworks, such as those that viewers without prior knowledge of an artist’s practice would have found di¨cult to appreciate given the setting’s spatial and lighting limitations. In one case, the artist Tru o ng Que Chi decided to change her work after the exhibition had opened, leaving only an intangible strip of light in her locker. The
~ exhibition o¨ce, located at Nguyen Huy An’s studio, has kept an archive of the printed email exchange between Que Chi and The Appendix Group regarding the thinking behind this change. It brings to mind many such exchanges between artist and curator, not least the letter written by Kai Altho¥ to Carolyn Christovbakargiev, presented at Documenta 13 in a room that was empty apart from the wind, in which he requested to withdraw from the exhibition. The Appendix Group is both caring for and guarding, an arduous task that is di¨cult to fulfil; one will never reach the finish line on the flight towards the skyline. Arlette Quynh-anh Tra¯n
Translated from the Vietnamese by Thái Hà
~ facing page Nguyen Va˘n Phúc,
The leaves of thorny bamboo and the spatial shift, 2020, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi ~ above Nguyen Kim To Lan,
Untitled (‘Which Life Did We Love Each Other’), Hanoi version, 2020, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist