Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba is a Japanese/Vietnamese artist who’s held exhibitions all over the world. He has created many spatial design and film projects. One of these is 'Towards the Complex-For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards' (2001) a film produced underwater at a Vietnamese beach.
The video depicts six Vietnamese fishermen pulling cyclos along the sea shore. As I watched this I found it graceful and awkward at the same time, due to the fishermen being very good swimmers but having a hard time with the heavy cyclos, especially further on in the film as the water became deeper and the ground more treacherous. The only sound you hear apart from bubbles is an electronic mix of bells and flutes, which take on a more urgent tone as the journey becomes more dangerous.
At the end the fishermen can’t continue and abandon their cyclos, swimming away to what Hewitt described as swimming “together towards the surface in a tentative kind of victory or failure, which isn’t necessarily clear, and emerge into a new, unknown future”
I believe Nguyen-Hatsushiba intended the video to be a metaphor for the challenges of everyday life for the Vietnamese, especially the boat people of whom many were killed in the war. The ending could symbolise the war and how the people must deal with this now. The water could also represent alienation in the way that it surrounds the boat people making it impossible for them to communicate.
This work has ideas from Modernism. According to Durkheim Modernism was a time of uncertainty when urbanization broke down the traditional values of society and left individuals to reinvent a new way of life, giving a sense of loss and isolation. This feeling of isolation is linked to the Vietnamese, because they do not know how to respond to the new post-war world around them. Like the fishermen pushing the cyclos in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s film for the Vietnamese to survive they must let go of their cyclos (past) and move on to the unknown future.
The title, Towards the Complex-For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards, reflects Nguyen-Hatsushiba intentions in the way that Towards the Complex could be the journey with the cyclos/journey of Vietnamese people today and how it is complicated and unresolved. The courageous, the curious, and the cowards could be talking about the history and national identity of the Vietnamese and their troubles.
References
Hewitt, K. For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards (2008) retrieved 13/04/10 from http://www.nyartbeat.com/nyablog/2008/07/for-the-courageous-the-curious-and-the-cowards/
jun-nguyen-hatsushiba (n.d) retrieved 13/4/2010 from http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/#/artists/jun-nguyen-hatsushiba/
Hey Laura, good job on answering and researching :D
ReplyDeletei think his film work is really interesting and weird at the same time, the fact that he came up with such ideas are quite phenomenal. Not to mention how difficult it would be for the fishermen to swim down so deep. I agree on how you think that the the title of the work 'The courageous, the curious, and the cowards' could be talking about the history and national identity of the Vietnamese and their troubles as many boat people were killed in the war.