“Everything Is Not Lost”: Vietnam 30 Years On
Pipo Nguyen-duy Ha Long Bay 2001 Courtesy of Sam Lee Gallery
The widespread and graphic national media coverage that broadcast the Vietnam War to the general public in the 1960s and 70s has become a touchstone for the political power that imagery can have in shaping our collective memory of historical events. In “Everything Is Not Lost,” the Or/Belkin Satellite’s newest group exhibition, four contemporary Vietnamese artists explore the ongoing legacy of this imagery 30 years later, using clever turns of visual language to create new narratives of their own.
By replicating famous images of the Vietnam War but obscuring their central human figures, Christian Nguyen’s drawings examine the critical longevity—and possible expiration date—attached to war images circulating in the public realm. Khanh Vo’s delicate sculptural installations likewise interrogate the translatability of lived experience by transforming the gallery into a “refugee space” that is both aesthetically evocative and oppressively claustrophobic.
Working in a more nostalgic vein, Nhan Duc Nguyen offers an historical account of the rise of Vietnamese cuisine in Vancouver through a multi-site project drawn from interviews with immigrant restauranteurs, while Pipo Nguyen-duy’s lyrical photographs combine landscape painting conventions with childhood memories of Vietnam. Taken together, these diverse projects interrogate the distinctions between public and private forms of memory and pay tribute to the ongoing power of the image in shaping our understanding of history. (555 Hamilton St, Vancouver BC)
Nhan Duc Nguyen Van Mieu: Nhu Xua (Shrine to Literature: Redux) 2008 Installation view
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