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From: http://searingcritique.blogspot.com
Pipo Nguyen-Duy & The Parody of the American Gaze
In 1975, Douglas Crimp declared postmodernism a movement of young artists "committed to radical innovation," in October, the hallmark journal of the postmodern era. Thankfully, while the writings of Douglas Crimp have diminished and the journal October has dissolved, postmodern innovation and radicalism can still be found in the heart of Los Angeles's Chinatown. At the Sam Lee Gallery, the current exhibit of Pipo Nguyen-Duy's photographs conveys an inspired contemporary application of postmodern artistic techniques. In each photograph, the photographer has staged his subjects and manipulated his work in such a manner that allude to previous postmodern artistic renderings such as Cindy Sherman, but also engage in a new social critique. Pipo Nguyen-Duy uniquely addresses the confounding realities in Vietnam today, and his photographs highlight both the country's natural beauty and unsettling hardships. These representations contain "the good, the bad, and the ugly" in contemporary Vietnam and present the beauty of Vietnam and the Vietnamese as disturbingly tainted. Through manipulated imagery, America’s physical and social mutilation of the Vietnamese landscape and people are subversively alluded to in Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s work. Thus, just as Cindy Sherman uses her staged photographs as a means to explore the implications female objectivity, Pipo Nguyen-Duy engages in the same postmodern critical process. Pipo Nguyen-Duy transgresses from Sherman’s parody of the male gaze to one of the American gaze. As the viewer, often American, is tempted to grasp the inherent beauty of Vietnam, but confronted with undertones of a damaged reality.
The staging of Pipo Nguyen-Duy human subjects is the primary means in which these photographs are parodic images. Particularly in the photos with the amputated individuals, these graphic pictures disrupt the viewers’ inclination to interpret the portraits as a glorified representation of Vietnam. From the man missing both legs to the individual with mutilated facial features, these subjects are highly personal, humanizing the scars of the Vietnamese population. Even the other portraits, such as the little girls standing in the water, present individuals in a surreal manner, with stark facial expressions, rigid postures, and ambiguous emotions. The inherent parody of these representations is constructed through Pipo Nguyen-Duy jointly representing both natural despair and delight. Disturbingly, one of the figures most disabled, a double amputated man, lies joyfully smirking in his portrait, as if pleasantly portraying his own physical limitations. Less hopefully rendered is the other individual who missing both legs, with this man glaring troublingly into the sky, as if to seek divine salvation. These incongruent portrayals highlight both the inherent optimism of these individuals but also the dysfunctional desire of viewer, who can perceive superficial joy and progress, but also profound physical pain and shared struggle.
In addition to the contrived posing and gestures of Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s subjects, the photographic parodies are deeply rooted in the postmodern artists’ critique of realism. Each image at the Sam Lee Gallery presents the viewer with vivid, crisp, colorful imagery that is suggestive of a natural reality. On close inspection, the colors contain artificial undertones with the vegetation unnaturally neon green and the sky obliquely gray. Through these simulated environments and staged positions, Pipo Nguyen-Duy presents the landscapes of Vietnam as surreal. The bizarrely conveyed depictions temp the viewer into perceiving an aesthetically pleasing Vietnam, however, even the subtly manipulated elements of Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s photographs suggest a contradictory reality and the false representations facilitated by the photographic medium.
Roland Barthes once said, “La réalité se montre, le reel se démontre,” which translates to “reality is displayed, “the real” is demonstrated. This distinction has clearly been applied to Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s work. With smirks, bizarre scenarios, and lush, natural landscapes, these representations of Vietnam mock American viewership. While inherently inclined to perceive “the reality” of modern Vietnam, and its postwar progress and beauty, altercations to this photography unpack “the real” Vietnam, fraught with underlying issues and physical scars. Therefore, Pipo Nguyen-Duy has inspiringly utilized the tactics that first emerged a quarter century ago with artists like Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo. Using staging and manipulation, this photography portrays the modern contradictions of Vietnam and the American gaze. Just as Barthes articulated, Pipo Nguyen-Duy depicts not what is an objective reality, but what are the confounding, personal struggles for Vietnam.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Pipo Nguyen-duy East of Eden: Vietnam September 12 – October 24, 2009 Reception for the Artist: Saturday, September 12, 6 – 9 pm
Los Angeles, CA - Sam Lee Gallery is pleased to present Pipo Nguyen-duy’s East of Eden: Vietnam exhibition that opens September 12 and closes October 24, 2009. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Saturday, September 12, 6 to 9 p.m. Pipo Nguyen-duy’s East of Eden: Vietnam, his third solo exhibition at the gallery, offers the viewer a new series of staged, large-scale, color photographs that explores hope and renewal thirty years after the Vietnam Conflict. East of Eden: Vietnam is the 3rd installment of the artist’s ongoing, epic photographic project that crosses vast terrain and explores the displacement of humanity from a post September 11 perspective. This new work represents the culmination of 2 grueling trips to Vietnam; Nguyen-duy (in 2005 and 2009) traversed the country on a rented moped in search of war survivors—both afflicted civilians and amputee ex-combatants—and photograph them against the idyllic Southeast Asian landscape. The series has come full circle. Nguyen-duy fled Vietnam in 1975, like the prodigal son, has returned home metaphorically and physically to complete this work. In East of Eden: Vietnam, Nguyen-duy has not veered far from his signature art practice, focusing on producing images that employ a blend of documentation and performance. Using the landscape as a post-apocalyptic “Eden,” Nguyen-duy points out the horrific evidence of violent conflict but also focuses on the persistence of the human spirit. Each image conjures a narrative that haunts at the past but also looks to the future. With Remembrance (2005), two young Vietnamese girls stand in shin-deep water of a lotus pond; they both acknowledge the viewer’s gaze and are surrounded by candle-lit lanterns—each votive representing a soul past—that will float downstream in a ritual that remembers the dead but also appreciates the living. In Father and Son (2005), both figures sit side-by-side underneath a shady tree; the father with missing eyes looks forward in solemnized dignity while his son quietly contemplates the unknown. Nguyen-duy, born in Hue, Vietnam in 1962, received a master’s degree of fine arts in photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1998. The artist lives in Ashland, Oregon, and teaches at Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, where he is associate professor of photography. His work has been shown internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Light Work Gallery in New York, the Faaborg Museum in Denmark, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.
Digital images are available for press purposes. Please email (info@samleegallery.com) for reproduction requests.
Sam Lee Gallery is located at 990 N. Hill Street #190, Los Angeles, CA 90012, Phone 323-227-0275, Facsimile 323-227-0256. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 6 pm. For detailed information, please visit the gallery’s website, www.samleegallery.com.
Art Lmd. Profile. October 2007 Pipo Nguyen-duy’s large-scale color photographs of solitary figures adrift in lush, sometimes ravaged landscapes evoke our post-9/11 anxieties without any overt images of the Twin Towers or other icons from that tragic day. Instead, the artist-photographer places his figures in landscapes that could be anywhere in an effort to simultaneously examine and question the American frontier as a latter-day Eden. In photograph after photograph, the land becomes his personal metaphor for the human condition. Many of Nguyen-duy’s images imply ambiguous narratives triggered by the gestures of his mostly isolated figures who appear at odds with their surroundings. “It’s about the civilian and the humanity that exists in that particular anxious landscape,” says Nguyen-duy. “I think these aren’t specific landscapes, but they’re symbolic landscapes.” The symbolic landscape found in Nguyen-duy’s piece The Mountain Fire features a young boy with his back to the camera, dwarfed by the magnitude of the surrounding environment. “I see my son in it, but at the same time I see myself,” Nguyen-duy says of the work. “I hope this work—even though it stems from an autobiographical impulse—by using other people, I hope the narrative can be more universal rather than the kind of identity-based, performative images.” Likewise, the isolated figures populating such pieces as Nomad, Lazy Boy, and Butterfly also function as surrogates for the 45-year-old artist. “I don’t think these [works] are about catharsis,” Nguyen-duy explains. “It’s more about telling stories that I never had a chance to tell. After September 11, I remember just thinking to myself how to my students and my children, friends of mine who are living in this culture—that particular day marks [how things] will never be the same again. We will be living in a time of war.” Although the work doesn’t have any overt wartime iconography, the artist says many of his images are loosely inspired by his experiences growing up in Vietnam during the war. The artist immigrated to the United States as a 13-year-old refugee in 1975, days before the fall of Saigon. But it wasn’t until Nguyen-duy was in his 30s that he began to make art. He earned a Master of Arts degree in photography in 1992 and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in photography in 1995, both from Albuquerque’s University of New Mexico. Like in life, Nguyen-duy’s art shows death co-existing with the possibilities for renewal. This is especially evident in his ongoing series The Garden, which documents abandoned greenhouses near Oberlin, Ohio, where he is an assistant professor for photography at Oberlin College. (The rest of the year he lives in Oregon.) More grounded in the documentary tradition than his earlier photographs, The Garden unfolds from the vantage point of the artist as an objective witness, studying these sites littered with modern-day artifacts with a Zen-like air of detachment. The weed-filled enclosures in these photographs erupt with monochromatic color, as if nature has reclaimed these small pockets of civilization. However, the cryptic titles of the works making up The Garden eliminate any temptation to search for a narrative thread. Here, the images emphasize formal elements like the quality of light washing over the various discarded objects in these abandoned sites. “I think The Garden is about [asking] how do you remove the photographer as much as possible,” says Nguyen-duy, who briefly lived as a Buddhist monk in Northern India during the 1980s, “so that the beauty and drama of that place can actually play out in front of that objective lens.” Pipo Nguyen-duy’s recent exhibition, “East of Eden,” could be seen at Sam Lee Gallery through October 20 at 990 N. Hill Street #190, in Los Angeles; (323) 227-0275 or www.samleegallery.com
Oct 2007 by neil kendricks
ArtForum, Critic's Pick Pipo Nguyen-duy SAM LEE GALLERY 990 N. Hill Street #190, September 8–October 20
Pipo Nguyen-duy’s sweeping photographic series “East of Eden,” 2002–, registers the complex psychological and political anxieties affecting American communities. The rich colors and idealized beauty of Nguyen-duy’s landscapes are inspired in part by Hudson River School paintings, but each is distinguished by an unlikely intrusion: a marching band pauses in the forest, a shopping cart rests on the snow. In Ring Around, 2004, the Crayola-bright colors of children’s clothing pop beneath a leaden sky like colorful bits of refuse, but the children’s faces, and most of their bodies, are obscured by long, tramped-on grasses. The mysterious and potentially nightmarish luminosity that characterizes this image pervades Nguyen-duy’s works, giving them an otherworldly sensibility. Like other artists who stage their seemingly naturalistic photographs, such as Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, Nguyen-duy dramatizes the everyday. Like the uneasiness he explores, all but the most surreal alterations are difficult to pinpoint, barely grazing the surface of each environment. Nguyen-duy was raised in Vietnam and emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen; this series draws on memories of childhood in a war-torn country as reflected by and refracted through the current climate of uncertainty. Nguyen-duy was raised in Vietnam and emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen; this series draws on memories of childhood in a war-torn country as reflected by and refracted through the current climate of uncertainty. —Annie Buckle
A tension from innocence lost, Leah Ollman. Los Angeles Times Sept.11/ 2007 The tension in Pipo Nguyen-duy's photographs is a subtle thing. Battle armor doesn't clang and clash; storm clouds don't erupt with violent force. Instead, the pictures exude a stability that seems to be eroding from the inside out.In the dozen stirring images at the Sam Lee Gallery, Pipo creates a strong sense of place only to use it as a setting for small dramas of displacement. Within the expansive beauty of the North American landscape, he conveys the predicament of feeling adrift -- without tools, means or direction.Members of a marching band, bedecked in red and white, pause solemnly beside a creek, leaning against tree trunks or sitting on fallen logs. The leafless forest behind them seems miles from any parade. In another picture, a stuffed recliner settles surreally into the shallow waters of a pond. "Nomad" features a young man standing resignedly in a murky stream, a suitcase half-immersed nearby, luminous woods spreading around him in unacknowledged splendor.Pipo's pictures read as allegorical tableaux, slightly stilted scenes orchestrated to emblematize a particular condition. The Vietnamese-born photographer, a refugee at 13 and now a professor at Oberlin College, started this "East of Eden" series in the summer after Sept. 11, 2001. Even when showing camouflaged snipers skulking in the woods and fencers oddly rehearsing in a snowy clearing, his compositions are keyed to loss and trauma. What have been lost in the making of this new "landscape of anxiety," as the artist calls it, are innocence, purity, an abiding sense of security, the same things he lost as a child living through the Vietnam War. This nation's surfaces still appear intact -- and in the case of the natural landscape, awesome even -- but its soul is most definitely in trouble.
"Sound Exchange" Goes to Sam Lee Gallery For immediate release: Los Angeles, CA - This Friday, September 21, 12 noon-12:30PM, Sound Exchange goes to Chinatown for a visit to two new galleries during the opening receptions for their latest exhibitions. Director Sam Lee, of Sam Lee Gallery at 990 North Hill Street #190, introduces us to artist Pipo-Nguyen-duy, a photographer born in Viet-Nam, now living in Oregon and working and teaching at Oberlin College, Ohio. We talk with him about his series on view "East of Eden" which explores within "staged, large-scale, color photographs, the displacement of humanity within a post-apocalyptic North American landscape." Join Jay Kugelman and co-host Loretta Ayeroff for a Sound Exchange walk+talk through two Chinatown galleries, this Friday, September 21, 12 noon-12:30PM on KPFK Pacifica Radio, 90.7FM. This program will be archived for three months on www.kpfk.org. |
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