The invisible face contains the entire invisible world.
The world is getting worse. Everyone is living beneath their masks, which serve as their face for business, relationships, politics, etc. I would like to see deeply inside their masks to their real faces, behind their makeup to discern their real thoughts.
I am interested in mask and face. I am trying to find the right way to present the relationship between mask and face as an invisible world. I looked into the transparent materials that can show its reflection, can breathe its soul, can transfer its meaning into the audience.
While reading The Mystery Of Art – Masks – The Other Face by Walter Sorell, I thought the mask is not only the other face of art, but also the other face of human-life. I was not only starting my “art-trip” through theory but also via practice. The first departure is on the train to through England and Western Europe. The trains I ride move from place to place and I meet lots of people with different characters and learn many interesting things that I did not know before. Everyone I talked with, every day I spent doing this, allowed me to absorb his or her perspectives and values.
Train windows captivate me. I love to look through them at people’s faces, the one who is being spoken to, being left behind as the train moves, remaining in the same place; the ones who attract me by their behaviors, etc. Because I feel very uncomfortable to have direct contact with them, I choose to view them by their reflections on the train’s windows. In this form their faces seem normal and natural.
At one point in my journey I had to fly. My flight was delayed; so sitting in the airport I observed people’s actions and reactions through the windows of the waiting rooms. I tried to ascertain the differences of people talking with close friends or family and with strangers. I realized that people are quite prone to showing their real emotions when they are troubled or nervous, especially when they are using public transport. In society nowadays it seems every neutron of the human brain is being used to defend against the darkness of frustration and paranoia, so people prefer to make internal faces—via masks. The mask can be real or unreal but eventually the mask becomes yours and can turn out to be your real face even you don’t want to have it so.
As Sorell quoted:
“The longer you look at a good mask the more charged with life it becomes. A common actor cannot use a really good mask. He cannot make himself one with it. A great actor makes it live.” (The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, 1917).
In Japanese Noh Theater, Sorell theorizes that the actor/dancer wearing his mask must feel the thing as a whole from the inside—“the heart is form” (p.59 – The Other Face: The Mask In The Arts). I found nearly the same is true in Vietnamese drama; the actors use their mask-line make to present the character of the person they are portraying.
At a small town on the German-Austrian border I visited Paul Klee’s house. The German hand puppets of the Klee family reflect upon topics and characters related to politics or society. It is the same with the Mexican dancing mask, “the being portrayed exits only the culture that gave them life.” (Mask - Arts Of Mexico by Dr. Lechuga Ruth, year?)
I wandered around small alleys of a tiny town and stopped at a little shop. There was a mask is hanging on the window, but the door behind it was closed. The combination of objects: the little mask, the window, the door; of materials: paper, glass and iron; the effect of this conglomeration of images from outside to inside creates a bizarre spirit and shows this mask like a real human face.
Somehow in my future performance, I would like to keep my original face but will allow people discover what is my mask and what is my real face. In fact, with me, an empty face contains many masks behind it. People from the East use their faces differently than those of the West. Westerners are more apt to show their thoughts and feelings on their faces. In Eastern societies people can be just as expressive, but in times of extreme emotion—anger, sadness, and disappointment—their faces become expressionless. A mask? To some, yes; to others and to themselves, of course, a sign that they are trying to control themselves. By all means, the face is there; it is just not so obvious.
I arrived in France and visited the Centre Pompidou of Contemporary Art, the modern Bibliography Center of Francoise Mitterrand and other places called “French Modernity Faces.” All of them had been constructed of and/or covered by glass, lenses, Plexiglas and other types of transparent material. They are becoming the future materials for Architecture, Art and Design. It brings people who are living in these “glasshouses” to feel closer to nature and comfortable. With myself, I always feel sick when contemplating a life like this. I would feel like a guinea pig in the lab, running around this greenhouse of a maze, confused, unable to find the way out because everywhere has the same view by reflection.
I used to have a repeated nightmare in which I was lost in a house with all the walls covered by mirrors that transformed me into strange shapes—my nose would lengthen, my eyes would turn upside down, etc… In this nightmare I would touch the different side of myself that I had never seen before. This house contains the invisible self that I had never believed existed. I was nervous and suffered yet simultaneously was excited to recognize the invisible part inside me.
I also found a special feeling when standing into the Ken Lum’s cylinders, in St John’s gardens at the Liverpool Biennial 2006 called “Monument To Napoleon, Prisoners And Other Things In Common” (Liverpool Daily Post, September 2006). He created a large, dark tube like the underground combined with three glass cylinder boxes, which allowed the visitors come into. The audiences would enter one box and there observe the actions of other people in the other boxes. They laughed at each other, were surprised, gained an eerie sense of the “inside” or “underground” world and were interested to explore their own “glass-box.” Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that they could not see themselves, they could only see the others.
I am creating three objects, separate parts of the face: eyes, nose and mouth. I place them with different locations and positions; I rotate, reflect, flip horizontal or vertical; I draw them on different kinds of materials: transparent paper, Plexiglas, magnifying glass; I display them with different styles: hanging, laying them flat… All these ways determine what I can do, what is the right way to present them. My recent concern is creating an object that is small yet can show how powerful is its whole spirit of the invisible world. The same is true for that contained in each face/mask; they can be small, they can be subtle, yet there is great power there. It also must be reflected in the real world via our parallel and objective view.
As Sorell wrote:
“The mask is the beginning, trauma and essence of all metamorphoses, it is the tragic bridge from life into death, it is the illusion of another reality, or the disguise with which man reaches reality on a higher plane, stronger in its awareness, clearer and more concrete in its expression than the elusive image of reality itself. The mask contains the magic of illusion without which man is unable to live.” (The Other Face: The Mask In The Arts by Walter Sorell, 1973)
Wednesday 18 April 2007
Mask _ Discovery And Utilization Of Masks In Life
I have empty boxes before me. To me, research resembles opening an empty box and putting anything inside that relates to your practices. I opened one box and found it was empty… I am picking up all these things that I have come across and putting them into my boxes: the first, the second, the third, the fourth empty box…until they are full. Who really knows when they are full?
Masks are the topic of my research, because seeing and exploring with them has always struck a deep chord in me. I have long believed that any and each kind of mask allows me different perspectives and feelings, and this in turn allows me to harness and apply my ideas toward realizing my visions. Masks created the human sense; they are words, characters, and meaning; Masks created the universe; they are fire, air, water, earth, and metal; Marks created the other face of art: they are the marionettes and mimes, the mask-line make up, the man in caricature, in theatre and in literature — mask has life, life itself. The differences of style and expression caused by using masks bring inspiration and dynamism to my art. My artistic theme is “Inspiration And Origination Through Use Of Random Masks”; my research theme is “Discovery And Utilization Of Masks In Life.”
My interest in masks has always been random, though never unfocused. In fact, I enjoy looking at the face of someone I’m talking with, or sitting opposite me, or somebody else in the same place… I like to see the changing emotions in their faces while they are talking, to take a look inside their life-masks to see what are they really thinking. It could be “Jesus, why I must be nice with this lady? She is too stubborn...” or “What a wonderful dress! I wonder where she got the money to buy it. Who bought it for her?” etc… When you try to figure out what is behind their face (or their mask), you find yourself seeing everything in a different way. How we see, how others see us…reality or illusion that reveals more reality…it is always a part of society. 1960s British “Mods” placed vital emphasis on appearance and style, partly to disguise their generally low economic standing …and referred to themselves as “faces”… (Mods - 1960's Fun Lovin' Criminals by BBC.co.uk, searched on January 2007)
The first idea that entered my mind for my MA project proposal is “Mask: The Other Face.” During the process of discovering what is the mask, how many types exist, what its influence is on human life, what does it show, what is its meaning… my experiments come from the texts on my reading lists and articles that I found in the library or on the net. At first I was confused by my ideas, what I must pay attention to, what I should do, what I should not do, how I could manage my time for my research and “steal” or apply new things. I felt like a person standing in the ocean who realizes the ocean is a vast place for taking a risk.
Reading Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Moscow triggered my slum memories, and from his writing ideas about cities emerged my Slum Series of paintings. It was shaped from a variety of influences. I grew up in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City’s District 8 and lived for many years in a house made of cardboard. But my friends and I never knew we were poor. Our childhood, then and now in our memories, was a long – term dream where our friendships and memories live on with many unforgettable reminiscences: showering under the rain, the green river where we swam and played all day, the noise of the market, of river boats… In 2003, the government began destroying the slums and replacing them with low-income housing. Thousands of people have been relocated to tower block apartments. But somehow, the buildings are as ugly as prisons and the people are even more miserable than they were before. In my paintings, the new modern buildings and the old poor paper-slum are mixed together. They have shown their “beauties” under the shining sun and the moon. The beauty is the beautiful souls of the people, not the place in which they live.
Benjamin wrote of discarded objects and figures, the metropolitan experience, of "having neglected to run away from home" (p48 – One Way Street) or "the awkward movements and inconspicuousness of the body we love where they can lie low in safety." (p52 – One Way Street) It gave me a look into the modern face of the cities in which we live and made me think, what have we to do with it? Should we continue to live as many people are living? To think as many people are thinking? To act as many people act? Or we are going to change them, show them a better way...?
Honestly, I did not think that far when I created my paintings; I just showed what I felt and remembered, why it hurt to see people forcibly relocated from the places where they’d lived their entire lives to places promised to be an improvement but which turned out to be just another lie.
Similarly, I didn’t believe I’d touched inside someone’s mind about the "Places And Non-Places" Marc Auge wrote about, but suddenly I realized that with my works, my practices... I am the one who is treading the realist path that makes people think deeply and look at what they did for the whole world, a world with dishonesty, with shock, with unfairness, with frustration... The world people must deal with every day for bare survival… The world with people living in a little box of fear, with what others told them in order to control them, and the few places they go to each day: school, work, home... It’s about people terrified to look outside their boxes and hating (fearing) those that do... People accepting what they’ve been told and being afraid to fight back when they discover they’ve been lied to... People confusing non-places with places and places with non-places...
What I found in these texts is an invisible world, where people hide their faces under masks, and present these other faces to the world. The masks can be real, like those seen in Asian theatre, or in European carnival parades, in African and American Indian culture. The mask can be unreal, such as in the lives of pop stars or movies stars, politicians on their campaigns. They confuse their stated life with what is real life, always thinking they are performing on a stage. They act in life the same way the actor and actress perform on stage. With a life like this, who knows what is real and what is unreal in our world now? As Marlon Brando, who both mastered acting better than anyone yet simultaneously resisted its life, said, “If you wear the mask long enough, it becomes you.” (p.32, My Life by Marlon Brando or Marlon Brando – Penguin Lives by Patricia Bosworth, 2001).
As Graham McCann wrote:
"... Clift, Brando and Dean are at their best in schismatic parts based on the unresolved tension between an outer, social mask and an inner, private reality of frustration and confusion..." (p29, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando And Dean by Graham McCann, 1993)
Marc Auge’s “parallel world” and his definition of “places” interest me—wherever “a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity” (p.79, Places And Non-Places) then perhaps non-places could define or reflect an invisible world which we can not see but sense its existence.. Using the image of a supermarket, Auge examined how people use their credit and debit cards for payment. A payment card can prove your identity; when you use it, your identity is available in the virtual world of online banking. Auge noted, “the concrete reality of today’s world, places and non-places are opposed, intertwine and tangle together” (p.107 - Places And Non-Places). When I book my flights via the Internet, the identity document required is my credit card. I wonder without this card can anyone know who I am or am not if I approach him or her at the airport and say, “I am the person who booked this ticket.” Even though I know exactly who I am, without a passport or a card, without an identity document, I’d be denied so many things. The modern world sometimes drives one crazy to the point where you’re not sure of your identity. Hollywood has produced many films about the modern world, where with just a click you can change your name and face to be a different person. Bob Dylan, once reading a newspaper account of himself that was totally fictitious, remarked, “I’m glad I’m not me!” (Documentary film Don’t Look Back, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, 1965) Interestingly, in his live performances a decade later, Dylan took to wearing a large hat and covering his face with white makeup. He wore this mask in order to force his audience to not see him as the legend of Bob Dylan and instead to concentrate on the songs he was singing—which he viewed, rightly, as more important than the legend.
These all bring me a vision of a world between the real and unreal that is quite suitable for my masks’ research. The mask is the other face of the human.
“The visualization of man’s face is, at the same time, the beginning of mask. The world is full of masks. We have learned to live with them on our own faces and on those our fellow men without being aware of it. What is more surprising is that we are inclined to take them for real faces. We are all mask-makers, who partly prefer and partly enjoy and mainly can not help living with a mask like make-believe of reality, a reality we assure ourselves daily that we must learn to face with, fortunately for us, we can keep it masked.” (p12, The mystery of the other face - The Other Face: The Mask In The Arts by Walter Sorell, 1973).
Jean Baudrillard wrote about the "Puppet of power" who is the head of primitive societies and mentioned John F. Kennedy's murder: "Power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic and political stakes. For power, it is a question of life and death." (p23, Simulacra And Simulation). I feel it not only happens with power, but with everyone and everything in this world, where people chase money, position, identity, trying to grab as much as they can while not recognizing the “thin red line” between life and death. The Vietnamese have a proverb: "Eat a star fruit, return a piece of gold. Sew a three-gram bag to take it." It is about a golden island where the crows love to eat star fruit, then return only three-gram bag of gold. A man who wanted to have more than three grams of gold, could not escape from that island, was exhausted because of carrying the heavy bag with full of gold as much as he could and died on the way to return. It means while you just care about how much you can take, you won’t see the dangers that accompany it and the price you must pay for what you get. The same goes for how people live. When you are poor, you just wish for enough food for yourself and your family. When you have enough food, you want a nice house, a beautiful car... When you get all of them, you want power and fame, a luxury life with servants and bodyguards. Finally when you get all you wanted, you just wish for a safe life where no one can find and destroy your life. What an ironic circle!
Examine the things I found on my research: the mask, the puppet, the face, the painting and the mask-line makeup for faces used in Vietnamese theatre. Every face seen via mask or non-mask has its own character: the drunkard in Japanese Noh theater has a red mask of sadness and obstruction; the mask-line makeup of Vietnamese theater (hát bội) uses gray-white with long line eye shadow and thin lips for the sly and evil; the Germany’s Klee hand puppets are reflections upon topics and characters in politics and society... The mask becomes the human face and humans live beneath their mask for their entire lives. Walter Benjamin’s Moscow discussed the invisible world whose face looks like a beautiful princess with a decomposing mind full of violence, sex and drugs…
I realize, however, that in order to truly make discoveries in masks, I must, myself, methodically and academically explore myself and open my mind. This will entail study, research, communication with artists who are also interested in masks (especially sculptors, as my work in part leans toward this discipline) as well as artists in general; physical travel and exploration in order to further discovery, and a great deal of experimentation to create masks with many types of materials. I expect the outcome of my research to include the discovery of a great variety of masks I have hitherto not employed and to which I can relate my current style of work; the discovery of new techniques needed to properly utilize these new mask designs, which will influence the nature of my work; and finally, the growth into new areas of expression. By discovering the power and effect of masks plus materials used to create and/or be applied to masks, I can fully express my mind, my heart, my thoughts and instincts, desires and sensibilities and achieve my goal of making art come to life. This to me is the essence of art and is why I pursue it so strongly.
I found a postcard of Marcus Weber’s be a clown at a bookstore on the street. Look at these faces: they are smiling but who knows what’s inside their hearts. They are crying for their life, they are frustrated by what they’ve seen, they are hurting because someone said their jobs are just rubbish... Making people laugh is not making you laugh the same way as they do. That your life is going well and improving does not mean the rest of the world is also going well or improving. The invisible world is still there with the gap between good and bad, high art and low art, upper class and lower class, black and white, wrong and right. It has its own reflection... I just hope what I am showing in my practices helps some portion of my audience feel it and be interested in it as a gift of life…
I opened the last box and I found these words: Modernity Of Face and I knew I got its reflection: Mask.
Masks are the topic of my research, because seeing and exploring with them has always struck a deep chord in me. I have long believed that any and each kind of mask allows me different perspectives and feelings, and this in turn allows me to harness and apply my ideas toward realizing my visions. Masks created the human sense; they are words, characters, and meaning; Masks created the universe; they are fire, air, water, earth, and metal; Marks created the other face of art: they are the marionettes and mimes, the mask-line make up, the man in caricature, in theatre and in literature — mask has life, life itself. The differences of style and expression caused by using masks bring inspiration and dynamism to my art. My artistic theme is “Inspiration And Origination Through Use Of Random Masks”; my research theme is “Discovery And Utilization Of Masks In Life.”
My interest in masks has always been random, though never unfocused. In fact, I enjoy looking at the face of someone I’m talking with, or sitting opposite me, or somebody else in the same place… I like to see the changing emotions in their faces while they are talking, to take a look inside their life-masks to see what are they really thinking. It could be “Jesus, why I must be nice with this lady? She is too stubborn...” or “What a wonderful dress! I wonder where she got the money to buy it. Who bought it for her?” etc… When you try to figure out what is behind their face (or their mask), you find yourself seeing everything in a different way. How we see, how others see us…reality or illusion that reveals more reality…it is always a part of society. 1960s British “Mods” placed vital emphasis on appearance and style, partly to disguise their generally low economic standing …and referred to themselves as “faces”… (Mods - 1960's Fun Lovin' Criminals by BBC.co.uk, searched on January 2007)
The first idea that entered my mind for my MA project proposal is “Mask: The Other Face.” During the process of discovering what is the mask, how many types exist, what its influence is on human life, what does it show, what is its meaning… my experiments come from the texts on my reading lists and articles that I found in the library or on the net. At first I was confused by my ideas, what I must pay attention to, what I should do, what I should not do, how I could manage my time for my research and “steal” or apply new things. I felt like a person standing in the ocean who realizes the ocean is a vast place for taking a risk.
Reading Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Moscow triggered my slum memories, and from his writing ideas about cities emerged my Slum Series of paintings. It was shaped from a variety of influences. I grew up in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City’s District 8 and lived for many years in a house made of cardboard. But my friends and I never knew we were poor. Our childhood, then and now in our memories, was a long – term dream where our friendships and memories live on with many unforgettable reminiscences: showering under the rain, the green river where we swam and played all day, the noise of the market, of river boats… In 2003, the government began destroying the slums and replacing them with low-income housing. Thousands of people have been relocated to tower block apartments. But somehow, the buildings are as ugly as prisons and the people are even more miserable than they were before. In my paintings, the new modern buildings and the old poor paper-slum are mixed together. They have shown their “beauties” under the shining sun and the moon. The beauty is the beautiful souls of the people, not the place in which they live.
Benjamin wrote of discarded objects and figures, the metropolitan experience, of "having neglected to run away from home" (p48 – One Way Street) or "the awkward movements and inconspicuousness of the body we love where they can lie low in safety." (p52 – One Way Street) It gave me a look into the modern face of the cities in which we live and made me think, what have we to do with it? Should we continue to live as many people are living? To think as many people are thinking? To act as many people act? Or we are going to change them, show them a better way...?
Honestly, I did not think that far when I created my paintings; I just showed what I felt and remembered, why it hurt to see people forcibly relocated from the places where they’d lived their entire lives to places promised to be an improvement but which turned out to be just another lie.
Similarly, I didn’t believe I’d touched inside someone’s mind about the "Places And Non-Places" Marc Auge wrote about, but suddenly I realized that with my works, my practices... I am the one who is treading the realist path that makes people think deeply and look at what they did for the whole world, a world with dishonesty, with shock, with unfairness, with frustration... The world people must deal with every day for bare survival… The world with people living in a little box of fear, with what others told them in order to control them, and the few places they go to each day: school, work, home... It’s about people terrified to look outside their boxes and hating (fearing) those that do... People accepting what they’ve been told and being afraid to fight back when they discover they’ve been lied to... People confusing non-places with places and places with non-places...
What I found in these texts is an invisible world, where people hide their faces under masks, and present these other faces to the world. The masks can be real, like those seen in Asian theatre, or in European carnival parades, in African and American Indian culture. The mask can be unreal, such as in the lives of pop stars or movies stars, politicians on their campaigns. They confuse their stated life with what is real life, always thinking they are performing on a stage. They act in life the same way the actor and actress perform on stage. With a life like this, who knows what is real and what is unreal in our world now? As Marlon Brando, who both mastered acting better than anyone yet simultaneously resisted its life, said, “If you wear the mask long enough, it becomes you.” (p.32, My Life by Marlon Brando or Marlon Brando – Penguin Lives by Patricia Bosworth, 2001).
As Graham McCann wrote:
"... Clift, Brando and Dean are at their best in schismatic parts based on the unresolved tension between an outer, social mask and an inner, private reality of frustration and confusion..." (p29, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando And Dean by Graham McCann, 1993)
Marc Auge’s “parallel world” and his definition of “places” interest me—wherever “a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity” (p.79, Places And Non-Places) then perhaps non-places could define or reflect an invisible world which we can not see but sense its existence.. Using the image of a supermarket, Auge examined how people use their credit and debit cards for payment. A payment card can prove your identity; when you use it, your identity is available in the virtual world of online banking. Auge noted, “the concrete reality of today’s world, places and non-places are opposed, intertwine and tangle together” (p.107 - Places And Non-Places). When I book my flights via the Internet, the identity document required is my credit card. I wonder without this card can anyone know who I am or am not if I approach him or her at the airport and say, “I am the person who booked this ticket.” Even though I know exactly who I am, without a passport or a card, without an identity document, I’d be denied so many things. The modern world sometimes drives one crazy to the point where you’re not sure of your identity. Hollywood has produced many films about the modern world, where with just a click you can change your name and face to be a different person. Bob Dylan, once reading a newspaper account of himself that was totally fictitious, remarked, “I’m glad I’m not me!” (Documentary film Don’t Look Back, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, 1965) Interestingly, in his live performances a decade later, Dylan took to wearing a large hat and covering his face with white makeup. He wore this mask in order to force his audience to not see him as the legend of Bob Dylan and instead to concentrate on the songs he was singing—which he viewed, rightly, as more important than the legend.
These all bring me a vision of a world between the real and unreal that is quite suitable for my masks’ research. The mask is the other face of the human.
“The visualization of man’s face is, at the same time, the beginning of mask. The world is full of masks. We have learned to live with them on our own faces and on those our fellow men without being aware of it. What is more surprising is that we are inclined to take them for real faces. We are all mask-makers, who partly prefer and partly enjoy and mainly can not help living with a mask like make-believe of reality, a reality we assure ourselves daily that we must learn to face with, fortunately for us, we can keep it masked.” (p12, The mystery of the other face - The Other Face: The Mask In The Arts by Walter Sorell, 1973).
Jean Baudrillard wrote about the "Puppet of power" who is the head of primitive societies and mentioned John F. Kennedy's murder: "Power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic and political stakes. For power, it is a question of life and death." (p23, Simulacra And Simulation). I feel it not only happens with power, but with everyone and everything in this world, where people chase money, position, identity, trying to grab as much as they can while not recognizing the “thin red line” between life and death. The Vietnamese have a proverb: "Eat a star fruit, return a piece of gold. Sew a three-gram bag to take it." It is about a golden island where the crows love to eat star fruit, then return only three-gram bag of gold. A man who wanted to have more than three grams of gold, could not escape from that island, was exhausted because of carrying the heavy bag with full of gold as much as he could and died on the way to return. It means while you just care about how much you can take, you won’t see the dangers that accompany it and the price you must pay for what you get. The same goes for how people live. When you are poor, you just wish for enough food for yourself and your family. When you have enough food, you want a nice house, a beautiful car... When you get all of them, you want power and fame, a luxury life with servants and bodyguards. Finally when you get all you wanted, you just wish for a safe life where no one can find and destroy your life. What an ironic circle!
Examine the things I found on my research: the mask, the puppet, the face, the painting and the mask-line makeup for faces used in Vietnamese theatre. Every face seen via mask or non-mask has its own character: the drunkard in Japanese Noh theater has a red mask of sadness and obstruction; the mask-line makeup of Vietnamese theater (hát bội) uses gray-white with long line eye shadow and thin lips for the sly and evil; the Germany’s Klee hand puppets are reflections upon topics and characters in politics and society... The mask becomes the human face and humans live beneath their mask for their entire lives. Walter Benjamin’s Moscow discussed the invisible world whose face looks like a beautiful princess with a decomposing mind full of violence, sex and drugs…
I realize, however, that in order to truly make discoveries in masks, I must, myself, methodically and academically explore myself and open my mind. This will entail study, research, communication with artists who are also interested in masks (especially sculptors, as my work in part leans toward this discipline) as well as artists in general; physical travel and exploration in order to further discovery, and a great deal of experimentation to create masks with many types of materials. I expect the outcome of my research to include the discovery of a great variety of masks I have hitherto not employed and to which I can relate my current style of work; the discovery of new techniques needed to properly utilize these new mask designs, which will influence the nature of my work; and finally, the growth into new areas of expression. By discovering the power and effect of masks plus materials used to create and/or be applied to masks, I can fully express my mind, my heart, my thoughts and instincts, desires and sensibilities and achieve my goal of making art come to life. This to me is the essence of art and is why I pursue it so strongly.
I found a postcard of Marcus Weber’s be a clown at a bookstore on the street. Look at these faces: they are smiling but who knows what’s inside their hearts. They are crying for their life, they are frustrated by what they’ve seen, they are hurting because someone said their jobs are just rubbish... Making people laugh is not making you laugh the same way as they do. That your life is going well and improving does not mean the rest of the world is also going well or improving. The invisible world is still there with the gap between good and bad, high art and low art, upper class and lower class, black and white, wrong and right. It has its own reflection... I just hope what I am showing in my practices helps some portion of my audience feel it and be interested in it as a gift of life…
I opened the last box and I found these words: Modernity Of Face and I knew I got its reflection: Mask.
Wednesday 4 April 2007
between the lines of realist and surrealist
I was once told: “Go your own way. Seek your own ideas. Create your own visions.” I listened closely. The first time my art teacher saw one of my paintings, in which I had portrayed the power of an Asian Tiger, he commented, “You are standing on the line between realism and surrealism. Keep it this vision—never give it up.”
However, even the most original and striking vision cannot emerge from nowhere; I have had great influences in on my painting. Three artists in particular, although extremely different in attitude, technique, even the eras in which they worked, have had a momentous effect on me. I have of course always strived to develop my own style, but Salvador Dali, Lorna Hannett and Pae White have deeply affected the direction of my vision, my choice of materials and my general attitude toward art.
It was around the time of my teacher’s comment that I was on the way to discovering who I am and how to show my mind deeply through art, and it was then that I saw my first Dali painting, “The Persistence of Memory, 1931.” For me the painting detailed how memory conquers even endless time. Time had gone, ants had destroyed clock, other clocks had melted, everything was dead, but memory remained forever. I instantly felt that I understood; I was moved and inspired.
Dali’s importance has been well documented and he is famous as one of the great surrealists. For me his great impact on art was his willingness to explore the psyche, entering practically delusional states of mind and then accurately and meaningfully reproducing what he saw there on canvas. With his “Paranoiac Critical” and “Oniric-Critical” methods he found a new way of perceiving reality that he defined as "irrational knowledge" based on a "delirium of interpretation." Dali referred to this work as “hand-painted dream photographs”—physical, painted representations of the hallucinations and images he would see while in his paranoid state.
One can imagine the effect this had on a young painter who saw things differently from others in a very conservative and old fashioned culture like Viet Nam’s! I felt released, emboldened, trusted with an important secret. Of course I could not do what Dali did or do it like he did it, but his adventures helped me understand, appreciate and be courageous with my own thoughts and feelings about art. Perhaps most simply but effectively, Dali referred to the "ingenuity of childhood," in which he did not paint as a child would, but maintained an open mind and the curiosity and excitement of the child throughout one's life. This too had a tremendous effect on my work.
Thus Dali shaped me by showing me possibilities and freedom, and giving a name to something I thought unnamable. If you refer to the two selections from my “Slum Series” included, you will see my own version of how what I saw growing up as a child has influenced the woman as artist, and how I have created my own “hand-painted dream photographs.”
As I progressed in my life and art—they always move hand in hand—I began pondering a mix of surrealism and realism. It was at this time that I saw “Mary Ann Rose,” created by Lorna Hannett, a Canadian wildlife artist. Hannett has won numerous awards for her wide variety of subjects depicted in realistic style. Primarily self-taught, she utilizes a variety of mediums including acrylics, watercolour, coloured pencil, pastel, graphite and one that really captured me, “scratchboard art.”
I like Hannett’s work not only for its technique but for what it depicts. She is a very good artist who can breathe the soul of her objects into art. Looking at the “Mary Ann Rose” picture, one can feel each light movement of rose petals, smell the scent of rose perfume, touch the dew on the leaf… That is the real life, but underneath the real life as a rose, there has a different meaning. It is “Life is a rose, it blossoms and then fades quickly. Nothing can maintain the same condition forever.” In its way, that is the same message as Dali's “The Persistence of Memory.”
I don’t paint animals, children and natural life studies like Hannett, but I thought, “What if I make my fantasies in scratchboard like she did? How will my abstracts look like if created with different methods and materials than the traditional oil and canvas?” So, I tried it.
ScratchArt or scratchboard art as it is commonly called is done on a material called Claybord Black. It is a masonite board covered in white Kaolin clay and then sprayed with India ink. Drawings are placed onto the board using white transfer paper. Then a small Xacto knife (#11 blade) or a scalpel is used to make small, sometimes tiny scratches in varying depths, revealing the white beneath—and eventually the image emerges. This can be left as is at this point or one can “color” it, using thin coats of acrylic paint or the colored inks made especially for claybord. The paint is scratched in again and again to achieve the depth of color and highlights desired. It is then coated with a spray sealer to protect the finished piece.
This technique resembles etching or engraving in theory, with the difference supplied by the materials. I created the engravings in my portfolio “Sapa’s Spirit” and “The End of the Day” with this technique. I sketch the layout on white transfer paper, then transfer it to the wood board with the negative side. I use my wood cut knife set, chose the right blade for each part of the drawing. I then print it onto a special Vietnamese paper known as “giay do” with different colors of ink, paint or powder. I feel it is possible to create surreal subjects by utilizing this special way of engraving, etching or “scratching.”
The third major influence I can cite is from the new generation—it is Californian Pae White, a contemporary artist whose work is extremely impressive.
White works on the borderlines between art, design and graphics. While working on numerous advertising projects she developed an idiosyncratic style of layout which has been described as ”modernist mannerism.” Her graphic designs give a sense of vivid colors and fragility and her sculptures share these characteristics. What particularly caught my eye are her mobiles, which she creates mobiles from fine slips of paper on nylon thread. As has been noted, this forms “a dense, shimmering, ornamental network.»
Sometimes White goes the opposite direction, creating solid masses, such as “Birds and Ship, 2000.” Such creations are formed with layers of orange Plexiglas lying on the floor. Laminate glue is applied unevenly between the layers to create patterns, giving an impression both of solidity and flowing movement.
I also like her “Clock, 2000,” which is a series of twelve cardboard - wall clocks in different colors, made using the simple techniques of cutting out and folding. The clocks do not tell the time in the usual way. They have their own mechanism, and each one stands for a sign of the zodiac. They are surreal, fun and though-provoking. White’s abstract, handcrafted – creations don’t serve a function and cannot be classified as “design.” They also don’t seem to follow any ideology or theory. Rather, they communicate through the hallucinatory effect of the solid impenetrable surfaces that cover them. They are simultaneously beautiful and impenetrable, so that is why they appeal so strongly to me.
White is a great influence on me for different reasons. Most obviously, our work is similar—not in appearance, but in basic theory. Like me, she likes to play with materials, utilizing anything from glass, string and laminated FedEx waybills to wire, thread, newsprint, and snakeskin on various creations.
White’s explorations with materials strike a deep chord in me. I have always been very interested in working with different materials, believing that any and each kind of material allows me different perspectives and feelings, and this in turn allows me to harness and apply my ideas and make me visions be realised.
Until recently I have not considered myself a contemporary artist and have not created anything similar to Pae White’s art. But this changed when I began developing my ideas in the autumn of 2005 for my next exhibition. I grew up in an impoverished district of Ho Chi Minh City, although I have wonderful memories from childhood. In 2003, the People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City began a social program to destroy the slums in my old neighborhood and replace them with low-income housing. The work commenced in the summer of 2005, giving rise to my inspiration. The slums are now gone and new buildings are being completed in order to relocate thousands of people. But somehow, the buildings are as ugly as prisons and the people in them are even more miserable than before.
This drove me to create my “Slum and Sunshine Life Series,” to depict both the present and the past, in order to retain the images that have lasted in my mind for twenty years. As noted earlier, the series springs from a dream I have had since childhood. At this time, everyone in my country was desperately poor. The Vietnamese had a saying then: “No one is richer, no one is poorer.” We all lived in the same situation, in the same kind of houses—some, like mine, made of cardboard—that are known as “slums.” Since that time, some of my childhood friends have become wealthy, some not, but all of us have retained unforgettable good memories of our childhood. We played under the rain, swam in green rivers, ran through the noisy markets... I want to keep our wonderful childhood memories alive through my slum series as a gift for all the people who were there with me, showing our wonderful life amidst the squalor that surrounded us. I also want those who were never there and never knew it to know it, feel and understand it.
Utilizing an array of materials, some of them “found” and others carefully designed, the first two selections in the series are “DAY” and “NIGHT,” as these are the two more important terms during the 24 hours of a day. The new modern buildings and the old poor paper slums are mixed together. They have shown their “beauties” under the light and dark and the beauty of the souls that inhabit them—not of the place where they are located or the materials of which they are constructed.
With the “Slum and Sunshine Life” series I am standing between the lines of realist and surrealist. My next piece in the series will push this even further. It may well be something of a mix between abstract painting, scratching technique or working with many different kinds of materials. In my opinion, the differences of style, technique and materials support to my art and make it more impressive. This is the reason I choose to be a person who is “between the lines.” Being there, I can fully express my mind, my heart, my thoughts and instincts, desires and sensibilities and achieve my goal of making art come to life and in doing so, to have people receive my art as a gift of life.
It can be seen that all three artists I have discussed here—Dali, Hannett and White—have shaped my ideas, perspectives and use of materials. My work looks nothing like theirs, yet is filled with their inspiration. As Dali said: "My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision..it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality." Yes, the step from reality to dream is just a thin line but this line is so powerful for my art. I choose it as the way to go forward.
*Life on the river - Color wood engraving, 60x60cm, 2002
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