Lab 5: Open studio & Artist talk by Nguyen Manh Hung

An ‘Open Studio’ is an invitation to see the inside of a working artist’s studio. It is an opportunity to learn more about the process of an artist’s thinking, to see a ‘work of art’ in progress. It’s also a chance to meet the local art community, to get a sense of what kind of contemporary art you like or, don’t like!Visit Rudy Atjeh, a wizard with cutter knife with his myriad of sculptures from paper. Talk to Nguyen Tran Nam about the design of punishment, and ongoing experiment beginning...

Artist talk: Asst. Prof. Nguyen Tan Hoang and Dredge Byung’chu Kang, MA

Fooled by Love: ViệtKiều Intimacy in Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema Nguyễn Tân Hoàng will look at the portrayal of returning overseas Vietnamese in Charlie Nguyen’s Vietnamese box office hit, the romantic comedy Để Mai tính (Fool for Love) (2010). The two central Việtkiều characters–Mai, young Vietnamese German aspiring singer-songwriter and Hội, a gay Vietnamese American entrepreneur–are set apart from the locals by their non-normative gender and sexual expressions. She shamelessly asserts her career ambitions, while he puts his effeminate mannerisms to good use in his cosmetic company dealings. Both are representatives...

The value of artistic labor as a laboratory of ideas

Opening: 24.04@6pm Location: Sàn Art  3 Mê Linh, Binh Thanh HCMC, Vietnam   Art Labor will share how ‘Unconditional Belief’ started as a kind of laboratory of ideas that began with a particular hypotheses about simultaneous belief in modern medicine and spiritual healing. This artist collective of 3 will share how their original hypotheses changed as a result of undertaking research into such things as ophthalmology*, to the story of illiteracy in Vietnam and the creation of a Vietnamese modern alphabetic script, to the occurrence of the ‘Magic Garden’ in...

Artist talk: Khadim Ali

Opening: 12.04.2014 @4.30PM – 6.30PM Location: Sàn Art Lab 40/18 Pham Viet Chanh, District Binh Thanh, HCMC     Khadim Ali will discuss why he became an artist, sharing his lived experiences of researching mythic and contemporary realities of violence and beauty, between Quetta (Pakistan), Kabul (Afghanistan) and Sydney (Australia). Khadim’s study of the art of the Persian miniature focuses on his re-reading of the ‘Book of Kings’, otherwise referred as the ‘Shahnameh’ (the epic book of poems by AbulQasimFerdowsi c. 977-1010 CE). In this literary masterpiece of Persian literature,...

An artist’s method

Opening: 18.03@6:30pm Location: Sàn Art Lab 40/18 Pham Viet Chanh, District Binh Thanh, HCMC     Adriana Bustos’ drawing, photography and video practice engages investigative and documentary methods of research, evident in ‘Proyecto 4×4’ which looks at the lives of horses that belong to people who recycle cardboard in Argentina; to ‘Anthropology of the Mule’, which draws on the parallel stories of commercial colonial routes of trade and the drug trafficking routes in Latin America. Since 2012, she has been working on a project consisting of a series of maps...