Vietnamese/American artist Tam Van Tran and Japanese/American artist Bruce Yonemoto talk about their art practices.

Tam Van Tran is a Los Angeles based artist. He was born in Vietnam and studied in NY at Pratt Institute. Tran is known for his abstract paintings and 3 dimensional shaped paintings that use a combination of organic vegetable materials mixed with acrylic paint that reference maps, architecture and science fiction themes. He was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and has shown at such museums as the ICA Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is included in various collections such as MOMA NY, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC.

Bruce Yonemoto has developed a body of work which positions itself within the overlapping intersections of art and commerce, of the gallery world and the cinema screen. His recent work in collaboration with Dr. Juli Carson deals with the discovery of the real and poetic convergence between two phenomena specific to Argentina. It is the site of one of the few growing glaciers in the world as well as the last growing Lacanian psychoanalytic practice. Yonemoto has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. He and his brother, Norman, were the subject of a major mid-career survey exhibtion at the Japanese American National Museum in 1999. Bruce’s solo installations, photographs and sculptures have been featured in major one person shows at the ICC in Tokyo, the ICA in Philadelphia, and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. He is had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Gallery, New York, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Tomio Koyama, Tokyo and his work was featured in Los Angeles 1955-85 at the Pompidou Center, Paris, and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, The Getty Research Center in LA, and is featured at the 2008 Gwangju Biennial, Korea. Bruce is Professor and Chair of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.