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.