BLUE MEMORY: Paintings by Tran Trong Vu
Arizona State University Art Museum
Nelson Fine Arts Center
February 7 - May 1, 2004
Blue Memory is an installation by the Vietnamese
born artist Tran Trong Vu made of approximately 60 sheets of painted plastic
featuring figures half submerged in water. These figures appear to be generic
Asian males wearing white-collar shirts and black ties. But they could just
as easily not be Asian. Like many of the artist's installations over the
past decade, these figures represent anonymity and conformity in an increasingly
global and transnational world. By hanging them in space, the artist has placed
them in limbo. They lack a specific identity. He paints them in black and white
to give them the appearance of a photograph or an identification photograph,
the kind used in passports and documents. Like a photograph, the medium and
its support, the paint on plastic, hide the "true” identity of the
person whose picture is captured. These figures are essentially commentaries
on the condition of being an expatriate, a migrant or an alien. As an Asian
living in France, Vu is faced with how he is viewed by the French authorities
virtually everyday. He is constantly subjected to scrutiny by immigration officers,
sometimes simply based on his appearance.
In Vu’s figures, the "officialness" generated by a photograph
is also deceiving. In Blue Memory, his generic Asian males smile and
appear naïve and fanatical. He describes them as individuals who sacrifice
their identities for the collective spirit of a group. They also appear to be
concealing something. Their smiles betray a secret, an error or a wrongdoing
that needs to be covered up. They seem to smile unaware of their fate or in
spite of the gradual disappearance of their lower limbs in blue liquid.
Vu describes the piece as a play on the ambiguity of memory. In this piece,
memory can be interpreted on various levels. There is the historical aspect
of memory, the emotional or sentimental connection to memory, and the political
significance of memory. He also plays with the visual and intellectual experience
of memory. This play is enhanced by the use of plastic rendered semi-transparent
by Vu’s heavy coats of glossy paint. The sheer plastic gives the illusion
of penetrating the minds of his figures, but the ripples of blue water surrounding
their legs deny any access. Similarly, his use of color plays on this dual notion
of penetrability and impenetrability. His figures are black and white but the
water is blue. The blue gives a sense of reality to the scene while the black
and white relegates it to the imagination. This, he claims, is the effect of
memory on the senses. One part of memory is truth while the other is interpretation.
Vu has chosen the theme of memory for his piece for intellectual reasons, but
also for personal ones. Having left Vietnam as a young man, his relation to
his home country is now left within the realm of memory. Born in Hanoi in 1964,
Vu studied at the Hanoi University of Fine Arts from 1982 until 1987. In 1989,
he was awarded a scholarship to continue his studies at the Ecole Nationale
des Beaux-Arts in Paris. As a displaced Vietnamese, Vu falls under the category
of what post-colonial scholars call "in-betweenness.” Not French,
where he lives, and also distant from his homeland.
This "in-betweenness” also characterizes his work. In France, he
is considered Vietnamese, yet his work resembles nothing of his compatriot’s.
In Hanoi, his work stands apart from the painting styles and subject matter
that most contemporary Vietnamese painters adopt. In Hanoi, where a growing
number of art galleries and artists are attracting an increasingly foreign clientele,
artists have chosen to depict more visibly "Vietnamese” subjects.
That is, they are making colorful portraits of women in traditional clothes,
buffaloes plowing fields and rice fields in sunsets. Few are making social commentary
in their work and even fewer are questioning their identities in relation to
the rest of the world. Vu’s position in the diaspora allows him to view
his country critically, but it is also a source of great anxiety. In-betweenness
is not a desirable condition in a world that strives for individuality and personality.
But it does give Vu’s work a powerful edge. He is able to examine both
sides of the transnational divide. In fact, Vu is critical of sameness. His
black and white figures – in this case, white-collar workers – appear
almost as one person, the epitome of conformity and the lack of individuality.
Through them, Vu criticizes both the communist cadre who follow authoritarian
rule without questioning its morals, and the capitalist businessman who loses
his sense of self by blindly following the market. His work is as much a commentary
on globalization as on the perils of modernity.
Vu has only returned to Vietnam four times in the course of the last 15 years.
His relation to his homeland is not without its problems. Vu grew up in an intellectual
household. His father was a well-known dissident writer who, after encountering
political problems early in his career, remained housebound for most of his
life and earned his living by translating novels from French. Vu developed an
ambiguous relation to the outside world through his father’s silence and
his family’s problematic relation to the Vietnamese government. This adds
to his "out of place” feelings.
After his father died in 1997, Vu returned to Vietnam to sort through his father’s
belongings and found thousands of pages of his father’s writings and dozens
of sketches. He decided to lend his brush to his father’s voice and began
to incorporate his father’s texts into his paintings and installations.
The first installation that can refer to his father’s life was exhibited
in Germany. Titled The Rain Room, Vu hung large sheets of plastic from
the ceiling and painted thick, black raindrops directly on the plastic. He installed
the sheets in an ad hoc manner creating a maze for the viewer through which
to navigate. The rain in his piece could be read as a reference to one of his
father’s poems and the tear-like raindrops evoked also a sense of loss.
He interspersed the plastic sheets with toilet bowls, a commentary on modernity
and the living conditions of contemporary Vietnamese. In a statement about this
piece, he said that European toilets were the things that surprised him the
most when he arrived in France. He became fascinated by how comfortable they
felt. But he also was aware of their absurdity. The toilet, for him, thus stands
both as a symbol of his cultural encounter with Europe and the realization of
the triviality of modern day conveniences.
Vu’s distance from his homeland enables him to ponder his own identity
in relation to the rest of the world. What does it mean to be Vietnamese outside
of Vietnam? What kind of Vietnamese is he? What part of him remains in Vietnam?
The use of plastic sheets is an important answer to this question. Not quite
transparent because he has painted on them, the sheets also engage the viewer
to confront his figures from different sides. Unlike the traditional easel painting,
the plastic sheet does not merely hang against a wall. Its flexibility allows
Vu to play on the notion of interaction with the image. It lets the viewer enter
the picture by its sheerness and its hanging position.. The painting thus blends
with the space and the space becomes the piece as much as the piece becomes
the space. Vu uses these plastic sheets because he believes in sustaining the
practice of painting. Although, he installs them himself in situ, he avoids
calling himself an installation artist. The transparent plastic allows him to
continue to paint, but in space.
More than a convenient medium, the use of plastic also gives his work a temporal
quality. Crucial to his concept of the ambiguity of memory, the transparency
and ephemeral nature of the plastic also enhances his commentary on identity
and race. Are his figures really there? Are they hanging in limbo or are they
on their way somewhere? Do they have presence? In France are Asians a part of
French society or are they foreign? Are they transparent, opaque or real? Ultimately,
Blue Memory is about art and its ability or inability to capture the
truth, for art is at the crossroads of reality and fiction.
Nora Annesley Taylor, Associate Professor
Arizona State University
Interdisciplinary Humanities Program and School of Art
Co-curated by Dr. Nora Taylor and Heather Sealy Lineberry, Senior Curator, ASU Art Museum
The ASU Art
Museum, artist and curators would like to thank the following sponsors of
the exhibition and educational programs:
City of Tempe
Plum Blossoms Gallery, New York and Hong Kong
Friends of the ASU Art Museum
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
The Program for Southeast Asian Studies at Arizona State University
The Department of Languages and Literature at ASU
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