GRADIENTS OF MEMORIES LOST (2018)

Gradients of Memories Lost (2018) is a mixed media installation which takes the form of a chamber of reflection, 3 meters in width and 5 meters in length, without overhead light or sound.

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Its stillness mirrors the mental interiority of the artist – a space of “circumstantial blindness,” where images surge and recede, impossible to discern. Gradients tells the story of a half-blind observer urgently looking, although with immense impasses, for a history refracted by time, discourses, and different ways of seeing.

 

The audience is invited to look at the work from several perspectives and locations inside the chamber. Upon entering, occupiers encounter a kaleidoscope made out of two parts. While the body is constructed from a Soviet bullet shell used by the Communist forces during the War, the container is made from an American-supplied 40mm shell casing used by the Republic of South Vietnam. Through the eyehole, one sees an ever-changing constellation of eerie silhouettes, as fragments of wartime photographs at the other end of the optical device cast their shadow inside the mirror assembly. Etymologically, the word kaleidoscope itself comes from the Ancient Greek καλός (kalos), meaning “beautiful, beauty”; εἶδος (eidos), meaning “that which is seen: form, shape” and σκοπέω (skopeō), meaning “to look or to examine.” The kaleidoscope as an “observation of beautiful forms” in this case, however, allows its viewers to observe only an ever-shifting shadow that appears differently to each and every person. If history and its image were to appear different every time one looks, how can one lay claim to anything as truth? How can one, in fact, see history?   

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Beyond the kaleidoscope lies a suspended landscape of white xô fabric (vải xô) a material of significant tactile presence and symbolic values. Widely used throughout the North of Vietnam, if not beyond, vải xô is present at birth (to wrap a newborn) and at death (in the outfits of mourners); at the times of menstruation and the times of bleeding wound. Ethereal, fragile, and yet omnipresent at the most intimate moments, this material symbolizes the cycle of life and death in the Vietnamese context. From the opposite ends of the chamber, two video projections are superimposed upon each other and the layers of fabric. The artist uses images from both sides of a series of wartime photographs, heavily damaged by time, mold, and other unidentifiable substances. These photographs were allegedly discarded by Vietnam News Agency (Thông Tấn Xã Việt Nam) in the 1980s, then salvaged by junk traders in postwar Saigon. In the front, large portions of the images have been whited out, leaving an incomprehensible visual register. Such an encounter makes apparent the difficulty of looking at, let alone understanding the complexity of the conflict. Meanwhile, the missing images from the front of the photographs have seeped into the back, creating abstract patterns that embody the irreversible destruction. A dialogue is formed between historical documentation and the force of time. Metaphorically, as an image changes every time it passes a layer of fabric, this dialogue is dynamic, changing as it passes from one generation to the next.

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In conceiving what is left of war – the bullet shells, old photographs, and fabric-as-bandage-of-wounds – as aesthetic abstractions, the work locates the aftermath of conflict as a site of hope and beauty, instead of desperation. As such, moving half-blinded in the opaqueness of the scene, the being that entered the space is not only reminded of the limitations of seeing but also the possibilities of transcendence.