Mask and Me (version: Madame Buttefly)

A test version of Mask and Me contemporary art performance video!
This project has been through lots of twist and turn, but we (Jennie and I) are always feeling happy and surprising to see its outcomes.
Thank you my beloved MUA Ngoc Vu. Without you, we could not make this happens.
@NightOwlArtdoingArt #Performance #ContemporaryArt

Recession Shopaholic Live - performed by Ann Tran

For Singapore in the 50th birthday! Happy #SG50!!!

May 2015 - Creative Movement Workshop in Ho Chi Minh City

"We dance from the moment our feet touch the Earth" - Sharon Chaiklin

Creative movement is any improvisational and spontaneous movement generated by inner resources rather than a set routine or formal technique (smauff2, 2010). All movement is correct and the process of moving takes precedence over the product. Each individual and her own mind and body influence the result. The teacher may guide this impetus to move using suggestions, forms, and exercises. There are no levels, competition, or necessary abilities. [Authentic Movement, Children, and Autism - Marie Abaya]. 

I have organized a workshop in HCMC in May 2015 to see if there are possibilities/ opportunities that Vietnamese parents want to experience the move and the dance. Thank you all for your attendance and your brave contributions to the program. I can see the children enjoys our time together and the adults are pleased with its outcomes. I hope to see you all again some times soon, very soon.

With love,
Night Owl Art

TALK SHOW 2012

Just found a link about the talk-show I did years ago, before gave birth to Manuka.

http://idesign.vn/content/an-tuong/caphe-trada/talkshow-dam-me-de-cam-hung-thiet-ke-luon-chay-bong-buoi-2/

http://mtcn.tdt.edu.vn/?php=scientific_detail&id=26

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Thạc sỹ Trần Huỳnh Triều An đã trình bày những kiến thức vô cùng thú vị về nghệ thuật sắp đặt – một lĩnh vực chưa được công chúng biết đến nhiều, nhưng lại hiện diện rất phổ biến đời sống thường nhật, từ những tủ kính trưng bày quần áo trong các cửa hiệu thời trang, cho đến một góc phố công cộng, hay các gian hàng trong một hội chợ triển lãm.

Phần trình bày của cô Triều An gióng lên một thông điệp: thiết kế hiện diện ở mọi ngõ ngách trong cuộc sống và âm thầm tương tác với chúng ta, góp phần định hình thị hiếu thẩm mỹ của công chúng.

Khi bạn làm ra một sản phẩm thiết kế, bạn đang góp phần ảnh hưởng đến cả một cộng đồng. Vì vậy, nếu chúng ta làm ra những thiết kế tồi, chả trách sao thị hiếu của khách hàng và quần chúng không được như những gì bạn được học trong nhà trường.

Các nhà thiết kế chúng ta không thể giữ được nghề nếu các tác phẩm của chúng ta không được mọi người đón nhận. Vì vậy, nếu muốn được khách hàng cũng như công chúng hiểu và tiếp nhận, thì chính các nhà thiết kế hãy có trách nhiệm với từng sản phẩm mình làm ra, góp phần định hình thị hiếu công chúng.    

Có trách nhiệm với từng sản phẩm của mình, quan tâm tới từng chi tiết nhỏ nhất và luôn luôn lấy khách hàng làm trọng tâm của thiết kế là điều cô Triều An muốn nhắn nhủ tới các bạn trẻ.

“Chỉ riêng mình em hiểu… tình yêu đó anh ơi!”

(câu cuối cùng trong bài hát “Chỉ riêng mình em hiểu” của nhạc sĩ Tùng Giang)

Tình yêu mà chỉ có một phía thì cũng không thể tồn tại được. Tương tự, nếu các bạn trẻ yêu thiết kế muốn giữ lửa đam mê và thăng hoa trong nghề, hãy học cách truyền đạt niềm đam mê đó, hãy làm cho những thiết kế của mình giao tiếp được với mọi người.

Hãy để mọi người hiểu là bạn đang làm gì, tại sao bạn làm điều đó, và nó có lợi thế nào đối với họ. Thiết kế chính là giao tiếp. Mà giao tiếp là một kỹ năng sống còn của con người, để tồn tại và thành công trong mọi mặt của cuộc sống./.

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October 2012

MASKS AND ME!

“Masks and Me” is a collaboration film project between myself and friends at the HCMC University of Theatre and Movie to present various contemporary art forms such as body painting, mask make-up, performance art and dance together in a 20 minutes short film. “Masks and Me” aims to bring Vietnamese culture accessible into multi-national programs in different regions.

“Marks and Me” is a story about young Vietnamese girl has nature talent but could not find the right way to express herself. She is stuck in between of keeping old ideas as the way it was or searching new directions for her purpose. On the way looking for future, she is helped by the masks around her.

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)

Directed by Jennie Nguyen Vo Ngoc Diem
Performed by An Tran

Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage - proposal

Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage
Installation/performance inspires from Vietnamese feminist literature.
.............

Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage.
You are not allowed to speak your own voice.

In the recent months, as a female visual artist who loves writing, I have witnessed and been deeply affected by the rapid and massive changes in Vietnamese female writers’ novels and poems. From the past, the subjects of sensibility and humanity were so admirable and had touched so many people. Nowadays it is rather on self opinions from the individual, somehow coarser and superficial, more discourteous under the name of new liberation.

Graduated from a British Institution (Master of Fine Art 2007, UCA, Canterbury, Kent), I studied Feminist writing and am eager to understand more on this subject, specifically on the influence of Vietnamese female artists. The project “Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage” which I am proposing is an installation/performance of sounds, images, texts from Vietnamese feminist writings, especially from these typical writers Ho Xuan Huong, Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc, etc. I have started to gain my interest on their works recently and somehow got them involved to my previous projects. This project obviously will be an active environment for the viewers come and discover themselves in the love for words and sounds.

“Only poetry endures,” wrote Vietnamese poetess Ho Xuan Huong. She is the first known Vietnamese feminist in 18^th century. Like any great artist, she understood both the limitations of life and the limitless possibilities of art. Vietnamese society during Ho Xuan Huong’s lifetime – she lived from approximately 1775-1840 – offered no opportunities for a woman to possess political power, to express herself artistically, or to even obtain an education. Limited by both law and cultural norms to a status little more than slavery; Vietnamese women were in the possessions of their husbands. They were figuratively and almost literally voiceless, rarely even able to leave the family home.

Ho Xuan Huong was born in Thang Long, now Ha Noi, about 1775. Although she never attended school, she became renowned in literary circles for her mastery of poetry. Her work was powerful, witty and deeply emotional. She died about 1840; no one knows where she was buried or what she looked like. There have no portrait, no birth or death certificates, no contemporary biography. All we have are her poems. Before her death, Ho Xuan Huong collected about one hundred poems in a single manuscript that was misplaced for over half a century. It was rediscovered in an attic in Ha Noi in the late 1890s. As a literary craze, inspired by the colonial French, was then sweeping Viet Nam, her work was brought to light. Ever since then, she has inspired, amazed, and charmed Vietnamese and foreigners, and has become a symbol of Vietnamese literature and womanhood. She wrote about nature, Vietnamese culture, love and Buddhism with a style and tone that is unmatched to this day. It makes us ponder our own lives, and where Viet Nam, and the world, and women, are today, two hundred years after she wrote.

Being a Second Wife
Written by Ho Xuan Huong, translated by Eric Schafer and Tran Huynh Trieu An)

One sleeps under cotton blankets while the other freezes
Curse the fate of sharing a husband
I get it every now and then
Once or twice a month, it’s like nothing

You take a punch in the face for the sticky rice
but the rice turns out sour
You toil like a laborer but without wages

Had I known it would be like this
I would have lived alone

Arguably, Ho Xuan Huong was the first known Vietnamese person to write about what we now call “Women’s Liberation” and it’s all there in Being a Second Wife, Teasing the Herbalist’s Widow and Broken Drum. There is also the playful Xuan Huong in Bulging Snail, Small Coin, Paper Fan (II) and Day Sleeping Girl, the introspective Xuan Huong in Lonely Boat, Questions of the Moon, Floating Cake, On a Portrait of Two Beauties, and A Well; the earnest romantic in Offering Betel, the prankster of the Teasing Chieu Ho “call and response” series.

In each we see Xuan Huong’s depth of feeling, breadth of observation and stunning facility with words, words that even two hundred years later, translated from old Vietnamese to contemporary English, written by a woman who never witnessed a society outside her own, one that existed before the telephone, camera or computer, still move us. And they are brought to us, fresh as the day they were written, in a new perspective, by an artist who has already made her own contribution to a new view and understanding of Vietnamese culture.

If Ho Xuan Huong was the 1^st known Vietnamese woman who dared to speak her own voice in 18^th century, Vi Thuy Linh - born in Hanoi on April 1980 - is known as the first and youngest Vietnamese poetess who brought a new trend for Vietnamese literature theme “Sex and sexuality” in 21th century. In 2002, Vietnamese singer Ha Tran and musician Ngoc Dai held Solar Eclipse live show throughout Vietnam to introduce the same album. The live show was designed with all songs written by Ngoc Dai and lyrics from poems of Vietnamese feminist poetess Vi Thuy Linh.

Solar Eclipse faced a burden of troubles with its commencement. In December 2001, it was hindered by the Performance Administration because the lyrics from Vi Thuy Linh’s poems were so "sensual" that they may "cause bad effects to the culture and ethics of Vietnamese music" (said Mr. Le Nam – Director of the Administration). Therefore, the album was delayed in order to remove and amend its lyrics. After settling the above matters, the show took place in April 2002, and then Solar Eclipse album was also published in May. The album includes 7 songs: Shadow of doubt, Don't sing the nomad’s love song, Other side of sunset, Weaving Tam Gai, Regret, Illusion, Solar eclipse. Two songs Dreaming and Introspection were removed; The tree of sister was changed under new name of Illusion. Solar Eclipse was a conceptual album, with a completed story told by a girl in love with her desperation, doubt, regret and obsession. Right after its release, Solar Eclipse made a shock to Vietnam’s music with its strange and new trend, including lyrics, melody, performance art and arrangement. Vi Thuy Linh had her name on the lyrics, and turned out to be the most famous Vietnamese poetess since that day. Showing no fear of public censure, Vi Thuy Linh's work displays the optimistic and adventurous attitudes of her generation. The anthology Black Dog, Black Night: Vietnamese Contemporary Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) had her works on it.

The tree of sister
(Written by Vi Thuy Linh – Translated by Tran Huynh Trieu An)

As the woman waited
Stretch out her arms
flounder with calls

Extremely red leaves
Plants grow in front of my house - a nunnery
Tree – of – Sister
..........

Winter is rushing
Just listen the wind is hoarse with fright
Just listen through the night .. Sound of free empty pond…

Throughout season
The horn round about
No footsteps of true love, stop by the cloister
Tree - of - Sister endeavors last breath to paint the winter red
No
footstep
stays still

Leaves pluck out, fly like fatigue eyes
Poor dry bare tree
Save a wild laugh

........

Then spring comes
Sound still familiar
The horn sounds cracked, no one knows
Suddenly the dress on her body, flying violently
Green sprouts blink,
Tree - of – Sister stretch her body makes gray, white, black leaves
Simultaneously lash through the nunnery’s roof

Oh ... the birds!

Different from Ho Xuan Huong and Vi Thuy Linh, Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc is known as a Vietnamese successful writer/performer/director such as her contribution to the Women Playwrights International Organization. In April 2008 Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, New York presented the first professional theatrical production from Vietnam The Missing Woman, written and directed by Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc, performed in Vietnamese and English. It enabled diverse audiences to explore themes of social justice and human rights through the lens of traditional Vietnamese art forms. In The Missing Woman, an artist's renderings of historical Vietnamese heroines materialize after the painter's wife leaves him for a better life. Through narrative; music and dance the painter journeys through legendary fables discovering the endurance and contributions Vietnamese women have made for their lovers and their country.

Vietnamese women are struggling between duty and desire. Somehow the DESIRE clashes the DUTY. The women’s movement, sexual relations and family arrangement in the countries consideration explores young Vietnamese female’s image of feminists and what they feel about themselves. This also explores their attitudes to controversial gender issues such as role reversal, sharing housework, abortion rights, homosexual relationships, nudity and pornography. Born in Vietnam, living in the USA as a playwright, Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc has been writing plays, novels and poems inspired by gender relations, the status of women,and the political programs of the women’s movement in different countries, especially on the stage and film industry where she saw things through a performer’s eyes. These writings claim that the rest of the world’s women (Vietnamese women for example) are reviving and treading the path to enlightenment and development that was forged by women in the West. Whilst there are striking parallels between countries and even across the whole sample, those similarities do not fall neatly into a simple dichotomy of the ‘west versus the rest’.

In October 2008, my performance was shown in Hanoi, participated in the Talent Prize Performance Art 2008 from the Embassy of Denmark. Reflection – Image was a dance with plate glass mirrors inspired from words of novelist Doan Minh Phuong and poem of writer/performer Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc. This piece talked about an exchange and psychological struggle inside one individual, a woman. The interaction between the reflection (in mirror) and image (in real) is the variation between the real and the virtual.

Reflection - Image
(Written by Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc - Translated by Nguyen Ngoc Minh Chau)

ONE – DON’T HIDE
Tears are not from my eyes
Down your own face, they’re rolling
The truth is not that ugly
Please don’t hide
How can you cover the sun with such small hands?
Don’t lock yourself within the darkness of fear
Your solitude will crush me inside

TWO – DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME

How could you destroy the body in which I still live?
Don’t you blow out the only flicker of flame in my soul?
Because then, the last ray of hope in you will vanish
Don’t walk away from me
Because I’m the mirror reflecting you
Please pretend there is no difference between us
Please pretend that you simply can’t leave me.
...

I dare you to break it…

Poetry is meant to be read aloud, and I believe that its real mission — to inspire thought and feeling—can be conveyed in many ways. Thus with “Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage” you have a thorough experience from the poems of “Women’s Liberation” Vietnamese writers, but you also create your own experience within your realm. The installation space will be an active environment, not a museum. You are there not just to listen and watch, but to contemplate, create and share your own feelings and images that are evoked by them.

In my project “Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage” I will produce sound versions of selected poems from Vietnamese writers; mainly from Ho Xuan Huong because of her influence to the contemporary Vietnamese women and few typical pieces from Vi Thuy Linh and Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc. It will be a large installation created by a cage with ivory painted walls. Texts will be written on the walls. Birds will be hung from the ceilings. Sounds will be listened inside the cage. Performer will sing her own song. Viewers will be encouraged to stand inside the cage to experience the sounds and images, and also to write, draw, and create their own songs.

“Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage” raises its voice for the controversial gender issue as devotion. Being a wife, you were asked to devote for family: parents, husband, and children. Being an independent woman, you were asked to devote for life: society, occupation, status. You are asked to be a person who people look on you, not the one who you want to be. Your freedom is in an ivory cage, not on the brightest highest sky.

Autumn verse
(Written by Unknown – translated by Tran Huynh Trieu An)

Please, don’t touch me as if you were drunk.
For years I’ve been accustomed to the coffee’s aroma and its mystic color of the night.
I’ve hidden myself closely
Like a snail sleeping soundly in its own shell.

Please, don’t wake me up, my dear!
Don’t arouse in me desires of boundlessness.
I must forget, I’m dying to forget, I wanted to
Just one cobweb you make, and there I’m trapped gullibly.
Oh credulity is but a woman’s holy Achilles’ heel
Please, don’t let me melt away, honey!
Like an ice cube in a bitter coffee cup,
Like a candle burning out in a sleepless night.
And night is immensity, night is coldness

Where can I hide when I run away from myself?
When my heart has lost its peace

You burn me away, burst me into flame
Body turns to ashes, the soul’s sorrow remains.

Please, my dear, for love’s sake
Don’t keep walking the old trail
I do not want another superficial act
Another time of foolish devotion

My dear, do me a favor, will you?
Let the snail sleep in silence
Within the dampness beneath the earth
As forgotten days pass her by…

“Fish in tank, Bird in cage” is a common Vietnamese phrase. An ivory cage has everything you want, pampers all your need and you feel safe. But you are not free. It’s because you are eating and drinking what people bring to you. You are living under a roof that people want you to stay. You are paralyzing your mind to accept what you are doing is right and want people appreciate your devotion. But you do not know that you have not seen the bright blue sky, the fresh water, flowers and tree, the Mother Nature, the true love yet. Thus you were hiding from your own forged happiness, one day surely will come to regret the decision you had made.

“Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage” takes approximately 50 square meters of space, 3 months to produce after the idea is approved. The main technique which I am concerning now is a proximity sensor which can switch on an audio play back when a person comes within 1 meter from the bird. The idea of the bird singing its song is inspired on Teddy Bear “I love you” toy when you squeeze the bear to make it plays the audio. The proximity sensor will be installed inside the bird. In “Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage”, the viewers will come into the cage. When within 1 meter from the bird, they will hear the song from it. The limitation of viewers would be 5 – 10 persons/ each time. Performer will present a dance/mute play within 10 minutes. As she moves around the cage, her movement will switch on the audio play back from each bird and create her own melody and rhythm.

Vietnamese artists nowadays face hardly with the society knowledge about the new art and struggle from time to time with the censorship. On the other hands, the Contemporary Art Scene (CAS) in Vietnam is falling to a disconsolate state. The golden time of highest contemporary art activities has passed away. As an art activist, I wish there were more approach, attention or from other culture activists in order to create a settled orbit for the Contemporary Art Scene (CAS) in Vietnam. As an individual artist, I believe the Vietnamese need projects like this that can broaden our horizons and vision on our art and society.

Presenting poems from Vietnamese feminists: Ho Xuan Huong, Vi Thuy Linh and Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc… to the new Contemporary art form would be a combination between East and West. It makes Vietnamese audiences accept and understand the new art easier. Many people first came to my exhibitions because of the curiosity. They learn about it after all and feel certain interest in it. The change in awareness comes slowly but can leave an imprint in one’s mind. I do hope I will be able to exhibit this project in my birthplace, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam as a gesture of gratitude to everyone who has been on my side and supporting me through thick and thin.


(*Series paintings: “Birds sing their songs in the ivory cage” - USA 2010)

NOWA SODA project - GREEN SEAS - Uncompleted

My “GREEN SEAS” installation bases on the contradiction with “white seas”, a term which had been called for the Solvay era. From storage for the post-soda waste which badly polluted the environment, the place is transformed to be green spaces for culture and art. From manufacturing products, the place is manufacturing ideas nowadays. A large-scale hanging installation with Paper Mache balloons to display Soda Ash Formula in 3D, from ceilings links with a green balloon pool.

The purpose of reality creates the power of transformation.

This “illusory historic symbol” is a “connected idealization” between the profit of jobs for local residents, profit of economic plus finance and the harmful impact on the environment. This is a fine link between live or death. I have witnessed and been affected by the rapid and massive changes in my birthplace, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. It has been far from beautiful and encouraging for the future, as the emphasis has been on speed and utility, rather than on respect for the individual, the society, the past or the future—not to mention aesthetics! I had examined the beauty of the slum life, the ugliness of urban “renewal” that is bereft of soul, and how they exist within the elements of nature that always surround them.

It has always being a good and global question of how to get the right balance? How to keep the green space for both economic and environment? How to keep your life and your planet safe?

We suffer because we encounter a world of harshness and suspicion, caused by ourselves who do not realize there has a secret connection of lives and places. Everything you give to the Mother Earth, she gives it back to you. You want people good to you, you have to be good to people.

*Unfortunately, NoWa Soda project is still uncompleted of the lack of sponsorship. I still keep this one in mind.