LE GIANG

“Majestic mountains and expansive rivers”

2021

Gemstone on acrylic Dimensions variable

“While creating the series of gemstone paintings, I discovered a new technique, completely foreign to my previous practice. To make a gemstone painting, one would use gemstone powder and miniscule pieces of gemstone, instead of paint. After removing chunks of stone from the mountain, workers would continue to use a hammer to crush the outer layers, removing any parts with darker shades, for these are considered impure. Only the “core” – purest in colors and most worthy in value – is used to make jewelry, orbs, animal figurines and other Feng Shui products. Whatever is discarded would then be pounded and grinded – either by hand or with a machine – until the stone disintegrates into powder. Afterwards, this powder would be cleaned with water-diluted acid, stirred on a gas or coal stove at 1,000 degrees Celsius until the water and acid evaporate completely, leaving behind only the gemstone powder.

The drawing tools used are not pen, paper or canvas, but a metal tray, a palette knife or spoon, and a sheet of Perspex as a base. Shapes and lines are not drawn, but sprinkled. New colors are made not by blending, but by placing different-colored powder side by side, on top of one another. Because of its bright colors and ability to absorb and reflect light, gemstone powder makes anything look dreamy and glamourous.

Even if what is depicted is a scene of nature being destroyed, our eyes would still be drawn to the illusion these tiny, sparkling pieces of stone produce. While the video montage uses shots taken from real-life (of machines slaughtering and penetrating nature) to imagine an out-of-this-world, magical landscape, this series of gemstone paintings – as eye-pleasing as they appear to be – in fact depicts the harsh reality of the places I have been to and seen, where nature continues to be ravaged by the endlessness of human greed.”

2021

Single channel video: HD, colored, sound, 20’13’’

‘Future Perfect’ is a video montage projected onto the walls, showing glorious images of mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls, clouds, flowers, birds and animals. These are visual motifs often depicted in romanticized landscape paintings – a popular genre of art one would likely see hanging on the walls of many local nouveau riche homes. I have always wondered why this kind of landscape painting is much loved here in Vietnam. Does it stem from our dream to live close to nature, within nature? Yet, what kind of “nature” is this? In this work, through close-up shots, within each frame, one can see in detail the impact of our violent attitude and treatment of nature. No human is seen, no voice is heard. Only chunks of stone being cut and carved by loud, aggressive machinery. Like slabs of meat, the stones are sliced up and grinded down – repetitively, smoothly and with ease.

2021

Dual channel video: HD, colored, sound, 10’14’’

Each visit to Văn Chấn, Lục Yên (Yên Bái province) is a completely different experience. In all of our trips, we were always greeted with much warmth and hospitality from the local stone dealers and sellers. They took us to eat horse hotpots, to drink Suối Giàng tea, to visit flower valleys, to visit stone mines, and to the natural hot spring baths… All of them are among the best specialties this place has to offer. On our last trip to Văn Chấn, Thanh and Brother Tiến* took us to the Hav Kab Yeeb cave.

Hav Kab Yeeb is located inside a primordial tourist area of a Hmông family. I am referring to it as ‘primordial’ because there was no service except for a small store where colourful ethnic costumes were hung and rented for tourists to wear to take photographs. When we arrived, the owner of the cave, a very young lady, was feeding her child in the store. On a fairly large piece of land, the couple owners of the cave built a tourist destination on the side of the mountain where people can visit the sightseeing area decorated with hanging orchids and check-in points adorned by heart-shaped dry grass. The remaining parts of the land was marked by the entrance into the Hav Kab Yeeb cave. Sister Rua (her name in Vietnamese Thư) told us that “Hav Kab Yeeb" means “Valley of Opium”, because most of the generation of her grandparents grew opium on this land. When they built the cave into a tourist attraction, they chose the name “Cốc Tình (Love Cave)” to attract more tourists.

*Thanh graduated from the University of Industrial Fine Arts. After a few years of work in advertising, he decided to become a stone dealer of precious stones and feng shui items made from Văn Chấn and Lục Yên gemstones. During my research trip, Thank took us to meet with other stone dealers and to other gemstone workshops. Tiến is a local stone seller in Văn Chấn (Yên Bái). On our trips to Văn Chấn, he greeted us warmly at his private house.

This on-going series marks Le Giang’s coming back to drawing and painting.

Intrigued by the colonial history of the Biological Museum inside the National University of Natural Science , which also includes a Botanical Museum whose collections were first put together by French scientists, Le Giang has chosen ornamental flowers as an entry point to explore the connections amongst colonialism, Botanics and its impact on nature. The arranging of flowers in vases for indoor decoration was introduced into Vietnam with the arrival of French colonization at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century. In Hanoi, the cultivation of flowers for ornament started in botanical gardens created by the French at the periphery of the city, then was adopted by villagers living in surrounding areas. At the time, this practice was only accessible amongst the local aristocrats, the French officials, and residents. Little do we know the popular use of flowers such as carnation, pansy, violet, or gladiolus in everyday life and special occasions in Vietnam originated during this time. “The Florist” includes 13 pieces of pencil on paper drawings. Upon her keen observation, Giang noticed how the florist modifies the flower’s form in various ways to achieve optimal visual effects for adornment: plucking leaves, bending the stem, reflexing or inverting petals, incorporating materials (wood, metal) to mold the position of the flower, etc. The physical gestures of arranging flowers, though seemingly delicate, reveal the quiet yet brutal violence of the human desire to possess an appropriate nature. Le Giang installs the drawings inside the working room of Mr Phan Ke Loc- a famous botanist who devotes his life to study Vietnamese local floral. Being placed together with the display of the university’s collection of specimens, the series of drawings attempt to portray the contrast between the violence of classification, arranging and the poetic aesthetics of ornamental flowers.

For her three months residency at Cite des Arts, Le Giang conducts research on the presentation of Vietnam in the colonial exhibitions of 1907 and 1931 in Paris. She also studies artist Lebadang, a Vietnamese-French artist, who was an Indochinese soldier-worker in France during the second World War.

Her main focal point is the “dinh”- a communal village house which was commissioned in 1905 in Vietnam, then shipped to France to serve as “Cochin-China pavilion” at the Colonial Exhibition of Marseilles in 1906 and as “Annamite house” at 1907 Colonial Exhibition at the Jardin colonial of Nogent-sur-Marne Paris and later in 1920 converted into Temple du Souvenir Indochinois-a temple dedicated to the memory of Indochinese soldiers who had “died for France” in the Great War.

In exploring the archives of these events, Le Giang learns about the past through its material remains with the aim to recover and reconstruct the archive, to reveal how it shapes our relation to the past and the construction of historical meaning. Le Giang reproduces photographic images as a means of seeing issues of colonial power relations, Indochinese identities, the seduction of exoticism in France and the changing meanings of colonial power relations. In these works, the embossing technique of the artist Lebadang is used to discolor and erase the details of the events leaving the viewer traces of history.

La Petite Tonkinoise is a installation reinterpreting a popular song of the same name, performed for the first time by Polin in 1906 then by Josephine Baker on the occasion of the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition. The installation exhibits an engraved work based on a score of La Petite Tonkinoise from the archives of the Médiathèque Musicale de Paris and a sound installation based on the original song.

Written for mass entertainment by two French male composers who never set foot in Vietnam, the song’s original lyrics are the words of a French soldier describing and bidding farewell to his Tonkinese lover as his military service in the colony ended. Through its portrayal of the colonial female body as erotic, submissive and peaceful, the song is an epitome of Orientalist representations of Indochina in French public imagination.

This work looks into how Vietnamese women were presented from an almost exclusively male gaze throughout French colonialism in the country. Doubly repressed by Confucian and colonial ideologies, both of which perpetuate a patriarchal order, women could not be vocal for themselves. Seeking to symbolically reverse this power dynamics, the sound work utilizes the voice of a native Vietnamese young woman singing La Petite Tonkinoise in the first person, as an attempt to restore to the female character a certain authority over her narrative.

In this reinvented acoustic version of the song, the words are chiefly whispered, some of them are even omitted and replaced by a soft humming of the tune, drawing the audience into an intimate contemplation. The space for the sound installation is delimited by four embroidered curtains hung down from the ceiling. The embroidery motifs depicting Indochina’s picturesque images on semi-transparent silk evoke the mystical atmosphere that pervades fantasies about the colony, while creating a sense of privacy. Penetrating through the silk blinds, the spectators will have to lean towards the music box to hear the confidential voice that leads them to revisit colonial legacies in the most subtle way.

Materials have been wilful actors and agents within Le Giang’s artistic processes. Moving on from the use of materials such as coal, plexiglass and most recently plasters, for the project Manufacturing Creativity, Giang chooses plastic as the sole material for her sculptures and installations. She wants to examine the meaning and possibilities of this sensitive material in our everyday lives as well as in our future. Being inspired by East Asian tale of The Peach Blossom land as an utopia , Giang creates an artificial landscape in the form of a hòn non bộ (island-mountain-panorama)- a common miniature in architectures in Vietnam. Le Giang collaborates with Hami Plastic factory, a factory utilizes broken plastic machines from the 90s and recycled PVC plastic bought from environment companies in Thái Nguyên province

The aesthetic of ruins, that is, the built environment in the absence of a human presence, has been a long-standing fascination of mine. In many ways, ruins “constitute an embodiment of the past” (Tim Edensor) ; while remaining temporally linked to our present time and an open future, a future which also offers critique towards built forms of humanity. When considering potential futures of humanity, we are also presented with the hypothesis that there could be a future with no humanity, with only barren structures and ruined remnants of human being. One aspect of particular interest to me is the inevitable takeover of built forms by the natural environment. This brings up questions of our legacy and our role as species in influencing natural life.

Exploring this motif further, my practice of late has been centred around the aesthetics of ruins in Northern Vietnam, the vestige of the communal house under excavation. This is form I chose to represent questions about the relationship between humankind and the natural world. The “excavated” reconstructed communal home uses the architectural ornamentation found in my father’s hometown village in Dong Anh, Hanoi.

Evoking a sense of nostalgia, the ruins are cast in plaster; the communal house, it’s wooden structure, altar table, the scroll ornament and the wooden matrix  are important Vietnamese cultural artefacts, a cultural history which is rapidly fading in the desperate search for the modern. By casting the objects in plaster we are making a concerted effort to maintain their presence over time. Perhaps, this is a futile act of personal attachment to the past in an incessant river moving us forward, in an ever-changing nature and society. It is a shift in our state of mind from living in anticipation of the future, to embracing memory and the past.

“Bản quốc tàn chỉ bi kí lục” is a fictional book compiled by artist Le Giang and researcher Nguyen Dinh Hung. The book comprises of historical monuments’ contents of which monuments either ruined or had vanished in Viet Nam.

亭者鄉中最尊之所也。上祀城隍,置神位,保神敕,為神憑依。下為鄉人會所。遞年遵節,鄉人于此祭祀祇福, 迎神入席,同民上下分盤宴飲。 吾鄉古有亭,奉事前朝大將軍為本境城隍。昔聖率水兵拒北敵,化於江邊。本鄉於此立亭奉祀,稔顯靈應,香燈 不絕。歷朝皆有敕封為上等之神。 値乙卯年洪水崩堤,亭宇一齊從水消毀,梁棟残瓦祭器少存。耆老童幼悽愴痛甚。丙辰年秋,同民合力重搆亭 宇,十月完工。規模雖不如前,然層樓畫棟殊屬可觀。詩云“孔曼且碩。萬民氏若。”余因以是知其神之安而知 民之若也。

The đình is the holiest place in every village. It is the worshiping place of the village’s the Holy Guardian, where his name and title are displaced, where his presence in the mortal world is kept. It is also a gathering place of villagers for meetings and important events as well as festivals. Every year villagers must perform a ceremony to welcome the Guardian to his mortal residence - the đình, and then enjoy a feast in his honor.

Since very long ago our village has a đình, which worships the supreme general from the previous king’s reign as our Holy Guardian. He commanded the navy against Northern invaders and gave his life near the local river bank. We con- structed our đình there to worship him, and since then he manifested his presence many times. All the later reigns have ordained him a High Celestial Being.

By the year of the Rooster, a heavy flood destroyed the local dyke system and washed away the đình, leaving behind only some pillars, broken tiles and worshiping pieces. This lost caused heavy pain for all the villagers, from elders to youngsters. In autumn of the year of the Dragon, villagers gathered their resources for the reconstruction of the đình, which took ten months. Although the new scale is not as grand as the original, it is made up for by proper decorative architectural details. The Kinh Thi Records stated that it was “long, big and grand, satisfying the wishes of local resi- dents”. Seeing that the Holy Guardian has a proper place to stay, I know that the people have achieved a peace of mind.

“Once upon a time, there was a grasshopper wandering seeking food that he got lost in the woods. The night came, it was cold and raining. The grasshopper tried to find a shelter and finally he got in the munia’s house on the tree. The mother munia asked the grasshopper to leave but the grasshopper groaned and begged to stay for the night and he would leave early in the morning. The mother munia felt pity for the grasshopper and allowed him to stay. She warned him to be careful not to kick her little munias with his legs and that the house was tattered by the winds. As the night went on, everyone fell asleep. Suddenly, there was a scream of a deer near by the house. The grasshopper was startled, forgot the warning of the mother munia, he stressed his long legs and hit the little munias. The little house was titled and fell off the sweetsop’s brand, a sleeping baby munia fell into the river. The mother bird flew around to find its baby but the little munia was swept away by the river’s currents...”

Excerpt from The case of the grasshoppper, Vietnamese Folktales

The piece The One Who Chews the Betel Is Mute is the close process between Le Giang and the artisans from Chuon Ngo mussel mosaic village. The traditional wood material from the betel casket was replaced by plaster. The artist designed the new patterns based on blueprints of the traditional village textures. Motifs of birds, butterflies were replaced by the unshaped abtract forms. From the artist’s sketch, the artisan combines different colors from pieces of clams, snails, abalones.

Following her interest in imagination about utopia and questions regarding future, the work was presented in a form of a betal casket found from a faraway history with characteristic and details suggesting the past of Vietnamese people. Vietnamese over the past thousand years have created the philosophy of betel with the dialectial manner beliving that the betel carries a heavy social identity (means of communication) and personal identity. The betel casket which was originally used to contain the means of communication is now being blogged hinting private emotions, secretive concerns which could not be said into words.

'Trach Truong, a sculptural installation made in gypsum and gold leaf, inspired by the ancient parallels found in the artist’s home. The Sino text, carved on the surface, was faded and partly destroyed. Roughly the text carries some long-lasting wish for the patron.

What are the thoughts that led to this existence characterized by a sense of loneliness, tranquility, sadness and nostalgia? What memories, sentiments, complaints and fears are contained in here? We can feel here the tranquility of time, a sadness and nostalgia of a fuzzy past, some doubtful thoughts about a hypothetical future, when all physical existences are covered, eroded and vanished in the flow of time. This existence, of ours, of humans, is it eventually more meaningful than these grains of sand?

What remains when humanity as we know it goes extinct? Who will come after us and how will they make sense of what is our present and their past? This imagined excavation site full of Vietnamese artefacts deliberately stripped of historical context poses these questions. The main feature of the installation is a plaster cast resembling a ‘cửa võng’, the wooden gate that traditionally divides the tangible world from the metaphysical one in the private, public and semi-public spaces of houses, pagodas and communal houses. But what remains when this gate is stripped of its meaning? In the future and unearthed at an excavation site away from the space it was intended for the ‘cửa võng’ simply is a piece of wood. The work highlights the importance of both the where and the when in determining the meaning and purpose of an artefact or a work of art.

For her residency at 98B COLLABoratory, Giang investigated the relationship between nature and man and the connections of raw materials and manmade materials. She also looked into the mystical objects in the Philippines, most especially the natural ones. She was intrigued by how these ancient myths are still prevalent even today. Interestingly, Giang was drawn to these realities: how people exploit raw materials from nature to serve as their protection and personal desires while natural disasters occur constantly in this country. “Nostalgia is not the opposite of utopia, but, as a form of memory, always implicated, even productive in it.” – Andreas Huyssen,

Memories of Utopia NOSTALGIA FROM NATURE presents the sculptures as artefacts from her encounters in Mount Banahaw. Nuno sa Punso is an object that implores respect for the land from its people. Mutya - the spirit of nature’s light is a coconut shell without germination pores or commonly referred to as “blind coconuts.” This is considered as a valuable amulet or “anting-anting” for its specific location can only be revealed in one’s dreams. The posts are vestiges of a house ruined by a recent storm, found next to Banahaw’s Jesu Salem. As theorist Ruth Levitas wrote “Representations of future utopias are always simultaneously dependent on the existing cultural resources.”

The installations in the First United Building imply a Utopia or more accurately a heteroptopia, where realities are divergent and with no apparent connection, yet implying relics of correlations that have been cast and moulded through time.