Downtown, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Where The Sea Remembers
The Mistake RoomTruc-Anh, Ngô Đình Bảo Châu, Võ Trân Châu, The Propeller Group, Nguyễn Phương Linh, Sandrine Llouquet, Thinh Nguyen, Tuấn Mami, Trong Gia Nguyen, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Nguyễn Văn Đủ, Phan Thảo Nguyên, Phan Quang, Thu Van Tran, Trương Công Tùng Where The Sea Remembers is a project—comprised of an exhibition, a program series, and a website—that explores contemporary art in and about Vietnam through the practices of artists who live and work there and across its diasporas. This project marks the launch of an institutional initiative aimed at fostering exchanges and collaborations between The Mistake Room and independent peer institutions in Vietnam. The goal of this work is to create opportunities that cultivate and support an emerging generation of Vietnamese artists, writers, and curators in order to encourage the creation of scholarship that expands what we know about local and regional art histories and how we come to know it. The result of ongoing conversations with artist friends and colleagues in Vietnam and others living elsewhere who are invested in the country’s artistic communities, Where The Sea Remembers is conceived as the starting point of an inquiry rather than its culmination. As such, it acknowledges and embraces its incompleteness in an attempt to re-imagine the function of the regionally-based exhibition format. Conscious that exhibitions have often throughout history been put to the service of nation-building, Where The Sea Remembers thinks of the nation not as a static geographic locale or even a diasporic imaginary but rather as a complex set of tense and evolving individual relationships between people and their ideas of a homeland. Thus, the artworks in the show and the contributions of program participants and commissioned writers are gathered as a dispatch of multiple perspectives rather than as a defining survey. The project’s title is largely inspired by the name of a song widely known amongst people who fled Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975. Written by poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, Biển Nhớ, or The Sea Remembers, was often sung as a farewell by those staying behind in the refugee camps to those who were discharged and relocated. The song’s famous refrain, “Tomorrow you leave,” foregrounds the painful separation of exile, yet as scholar Yến Lê Espirituhas written, its invocation of a place—its mountains, sands, and willows—creates a bond that forever connects those who have gone to the lands they left behind. It is here, between the countries we knew and the homelands we choose to inhabit that Where The Sea Remembers locates a contemporary experience of nationhood. One that is always forged by partial choices, acts of distancing and affiliation, and creative tactics of world-making. The exhibition introduces a recent history of Vietnamese contemporary art. It takes the year 2007 as a point of departure—marking Vietnam’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and a peak in the country’s Đổi Mớireforms that began in 1986 with the goal of creating a socialist-oriented market economy. Along with easing restrictions on foreign investments, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the arrival of multinational corporate conglomerates, Vietnam also softened its borders—allowing for expanded tourism, professional exchanges and broadened travel opportunities for Vietnamese citizens. This facilitated movement also gave way to returnees—foreign-raised Vietnamese refugees who returned to settle in their homeland. Among them were artists, who alongside local stakeholders helped found new independent spaces for the cultivation of emerging talent and the production and presentation of contemporary art. With a host of new industries burgeoning in the country, a reinvigorated institutional circuit, and broadened access to a global intellectual and peer network, conceptual art practices flourished—paving the way for a generation of practitioners invested not only in painting and sculpture but also in video, installation, and performance. Rather than prescribing an encompassing thematic framework, artists’s interests function as the structuring devices that organize the presentation of works in the exhibition. These interests include the role of technology and media in the construction of a socialist-oriented market economy; the re-interpretation of history through the construction of personal mythologies; the refugee experience and futurism; and the body and performativity. Through these interests, the artists in the show also unveil an expanded way of considering artistic production from the region beyond the well-known themes of war, displacement, and trauma. Truc-Anh Born 1983, Paris, France Lives and works between Ho Chi Minh City, Paris, and Los Angeles Ngô Đình Bảo Châu Born 1986, Vietnam Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Võ Trân Châu Born 1986, Binh Thuan, Vietnam Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City The Propeller Group Founded 2006, Ho Chi Minh City Nguyễn Phương Linh Born 1985, Hanoi, Vietnam Lives and works in Hanoi Sandrine Llouquet Born 1975, Montpellier, France Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Thinh Nguyen Born 1984, Bao An, Vietnam Lives and works in Los Angeles Tuấn Mami Born 1981, Hanoi, Vietnam Lives and works in Hanoi Trong Gia Nguyen Born 1971, Saigon, Vietnam Lives and works between Ho Chi Minh City and Brooklyn Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn Born 1976, Saigon, Vietnam Lives and works between Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles Nguyễn Văn Đủ Born 1986, Ba Rịa-Vung Tau, Vietnam Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Phan Thảo Nguyên Born 1987, Vietnam Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Phan Quang Born 1976, Binh Dinh, Vietnam Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Thu Van Tran Born 1979, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Lives and works in Paris Trương Công Tùng Born 1986, Dak Lak, Vietnam Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City