Friday 24 February 2012

Nhu Huy, the "facilitator"



So this morning, we had the chance to hear Nhu Huy talking about his experience of being an artist, curator, writer and about his constant efforts for many years trying to create a new dynamic in the Saigonese art scene.

Nhu Huy told us about the notions of pre-production, production and postproduction, notions that he borrows from the movie industry vocabulary, as firstly did the French art theorician Nicolas Bourriaud in his essay “Postproduction. Culture as screenplay: How art reprograms the world”. When most art galleries in Vietnam will focus on “post-production” (exhibitions, talks…sells…), Nhu Huy, with “Zero Station” (the alternative art space he launched in 2010), will encourage and support artists during the whole process of creation, from meetings, discussions, research… to the production of art works and then exhibition.

He highlighted also the social role of an art space located in a popular area by telling us anecdotes about the interaction between the artist/art work and the neighbors, local authorities, audience, other artists and intellectuals.

If you missed this one and want to know more about Nhu Huy and Zero Station, come to visit his website: http://www.zerostationvn.org , you will also find all the information you need  to get there, see some art, meet artists and eat “Pho” (the one served next door is supposed to be the best in town!).

Friday 10 February 2012

Our Feb speaker is Nguyen Nhu Huy of Zero Station!


After taking January off (mostly due to the holiday), we'll be kicking off the year of the Dragon with Nguyen Nhu Huy as our speaker.

Huy is currently managing ZeroStation, a house for creativity. Zerostation is a project-based art space which includes studio space, exhibition space, and an art residency program.  The main mission of ZeroStation is to create more opportunities for dialoguing, thinking, and working in art-project forms among young artists in HCMC and beyond. 

Huy will be speaking on the topic of what inspires him about the contemporary art scene here in Vietnam. 

A graduate of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts, he's worked with various mediums from installation art to paintings, photography, video art and public art. 

In 2004, Nhu Huy was co-founder of a little blah blah, the first initiated artist run space in Ho Chi Minh City. 

Since 2003-2005, Nhu Huy has been co-founder and editor of first Vietnam independent online art magazine, www.vnvisualart.com. 

He's also is an independent curator, critical writer, and a poet.  His most recent curating project has been “ Art in Marathon”, a public art project that took place over the course of three months in some public spaces here in Ho Chi Minh City in late 2007.

In 2008, he helped develop, “Xin Chao, My Darling” a group show introducing artworks of 16 Young Vietnamese artists in Korea.  That same year, his poetry collection, "The Complex Sentences” was published.

He has written, translated and published widely on Vietnam Contemporary art, culture, and art theory. He's been invited to be a guest speaker at the first international symposium on Vietnamese Art, “ Vietnam art post-doimoi”, held at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM).  In 2009, He was invited to participate in the Asian Curator Conference, organized by the Japan Foundation in Singapore and Malaysia.  More recently, Nhu Huy contributed his writing for catalogue of the exhibition, “ Video, an art, a history”, organized by the Pompidou art center in Paris and the Singapore Museum of art, the IFA catalogue for the exhibition, “connect: Kunstszene Vietnam”. 

He's also a member of the international contemporary art project, ”Hochiminh trail”  organized and curated by the Long March Project in China.

He's been published in the Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, having a conversation with Viet Le titled : “Transnationalism in Translation”.

Huy often focuses on the ambiguous spaces located in the gap between past and present, public and private, what we see and what we know, what can be spoken about and what can only be shown, etc..  His art projects take relational aesthetics as their theoretical and practical departure, always trying to create the platforms where audience and artist, art and everyday life, can encounter each other in many different forms of dialogue.

Contact in Vietnam:
Cell: +84(0)903747779
Website:www.zerostationvn.org


Wednesday 8 February 2012

Saigon Creative December event – a review.


December. End of the year and the coming of another. Our December event was our 12th event, a milestone that pessimists doomed too far away to reach, while optimists can easily count beyond that. However, a break was needed as January was more or less a Tet celebration and "Tetlag" surfaced once January drew to an end.

While we all await the next announcement, we can start the first post of the Lunar New Year with our summary from December.

December was the month where we got a glimpse behind the printed page and a broader view of the publishing industry in Vietnam.

Print is very much alive and the sheer number of magazines in circulation in Vietnam is proof enough. Nick Ross at The Word magazine gave us a thorough walkthrough.

We have all heard of "Freedom of the press", but what was interesting was when you start asking the question of freedom versus corporate interests. Having guidelines of what you can do and not do versus a board of directors wanting profit and thus seeking more sensational stories. A coin still has two sides. Another interesting
part was "The Cult of Beauty" and how Vietnam has projected itself as a beautiful country, including the tourism slogan "Vietnam – The hidden charm". This is what in the past was acceptable to write about this country.

However, over the past few years, some Vietnamese newspapers have pushed the frontiers and other "hidden charms" are now surfacing on both their Vietnamese and English language online editions. Restrictions leads to creativeness, or as in a creative brief, the more constraints, the easier is the process to find a solution that works within those parameters. In addition, the Vietnamese language is a very rich language and open to a wide range of interpretations and you will have readers reading between the lines.

So restrictions, creativeness and competition for readers bring you the need to improve. Survival of the fittest and much, much more.

As always, be there and get it first hand, direct from the source. Hope to see you all at the next Saigon Creative event!


Cover samples

Intro

Preface

The Cult of Beauty

"You can cage the singer, but not the song"

Striving for excellence

Nick Ross

Xmas tree, Vietnamese style