immaterial intimacies @ Sàn Art

Date & Time: Thurs, 22 Dec @5-7PM
Location: Sàn Art
Millenium Masteri,
Units B.16 & B.17
132 Ben Van Don, Ward 6, District 4,
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Language: English + Vietnamese

Through material investigations, Bruce Yonemoto and Việt Lê explore immaterial realms, divining queer hopeful poetics. Through their individual collaborations with spirit mediums, artisans, and local Vietnamese community members, the artists challenge the limits of Cartesian bodies of knowledge, geopolitical boundaries, as well as postcolonial intimacies.

Both artists evoke time-honored rituals as well as transcendent practices for times of crisis. For instance, Yonemoto uses lacquer—common in Japan and Việt Nam—to disrupt dyads between East and West, materialism and the spirit, the mundane and high art. Through a stunning large-scale black obsidian installation, Yonemoto calls upon divination practice: a commentary on mediumship and mass media as mirror and void. Using experimental film as a medium, Lê’s genre-bending video installation is a hybrid musical documentary combining interviews and animations to trace a portrait of an iconic nhạc vàng “golden music” singer. Extending gold as metaphor, Lê’s performative use of smoke, cutting, and gold leaf leaves paintings references Gutai’s discrepant lineages of movement and modernity.

Together the two artists call forth the art of mediumship using different art media (paintings, video, installation, performance), leaving traces, songs, ladders as remnants–conjuring returns and revenants.