PROFILE: JUN NGUYEN-HATSUSHIBA

: : Penelope Aitken

: : printable version  

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba is a global artist who began his professional life with an interesting act of relocation. Though he was born in Japan and educated in the United States – both good countries from which to manage an artistic practice – he chose to move to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in Vietnam. Hardly an art mecca, HCMC is the business, not the cultural, capital of a developing South East Asian country. When it was still known as Saigon, it was also the city from which most nationalist Vietnamese fled as the Communists from the north claimed the rest of the country. While a small number of interesting artists have come from HCMC, ‘from’ is the operative word: to be a well known Vietnamese artist you have usually moved from HCMC or Hanoi to San Francisco, Melbourne, New York or Paris. However, this same Indo-Chinese diaspora, which included Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s father and grandmother, gave him strong family connections to “return to” in Vietnam. And perhaps he also considered it interesting to swim against the diasporic current that invariably carries its subjects away from the third world to the first.

A similar obstinacy motivates Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s practice. Most of his recent work, especially that which has brought him world acclaim, has been made underwater. Painting, installations and performances have been staged and filmed on the sea floor off the coasts of Vietnam and Japan. The resulting works are dreamy slow-motion digital videos of struggle and bubble in which divers manoeuvre objects through the weight of water. Memorial Project Nha Trang Vietnam, Towards the Complex – For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards (2001) depicts cyclo drivers peddling their vehicles across the seabed, slowly ‘racing’ past white tents which billow amongst fish and seaweed.

In Happy New Year – Memorial Project Vietnam II (2003) a festival dragon, operated by seven divers, undulates slowly and sinuously, lit by occasional sun shafts piercing through the aquamarine depths. Behind the dragon a mechanical orb fires coloured balls that burst into clouds of powder as they float towards the surface. Simultaneously festive and threatening, this work refers to the Tet Offensive, a turning point in the Vietnam War in 1968 when the communists fought the nationalists during the Lunar New Year celebrations. Nguyen-Hatsushiba says of this work:

The memorial goes to all who had lost their lives in 1968. I am referring to the history which will always have more than one source and explanation. It is not about who was good and who was bad.[1]

The function of water in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s work has been discussed by R. Streitmatter-Tran, another artist and lecturer based in HCMC. He suggests that, unlike air, water emphasises negative space, or, in fact, makes the space around the work positively tangible. He writes that water: ‘envelops, nourishes, mutes, drowns, enables [and] impedes’ .[2]

The effect of slowing down movements that would normally be considered fluid on land, such as the traffic of Vietnamese streets and the procession of New Year dragons, accentuates the grace of these movements but also frustrates their progress. As a foil to the speed-scape of the globalised world, in which cyclos are pushed off the streets in favour of cars, and festivities are commercialised beyond cultural recognition, Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s works are memorials to the slow and the beautiful.

Streitmatter-Tran also points out that the Vietnamese word for water, nuoc, also means nation in some contexts. [3] This is an interesting contrast to the English language’s equivalency between land and nation. We think of oceans as the space between nations, not part of nations themselves, but perhaps in a language where such boundaries are blurred, it is easier to exist as an artist of the world unimpeded by nationality.

NOTES

1. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, email to author, October 2004.
2. R. Streitmatter-Tran, The Negative Space of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, art.es, no.3, May/June 2004, p.33.
3. R. Streitmatter-Tran, 2004, p.33.

Penelope Aitken is an artist and writer based in Melbourne. Penelope also manages the Asialink Visual Arts Residency Program and is completing an MA in Painting at the Victoria College of Fine Art.