Diamondesque jewels set on a giant multicoloured, multifacet jewel, surrounded by a ring of clear jewels sitting on more of the same on a gold trimmed and silver studded Be Be flip flop with a bit of wedgieness about it and silver studs teamed with flesh coloured, sun evading thong socks and, if you look very carefully, a flower painted on the big toenail. A winner on all fronts I'd say. 

Sometimes I am so glad my giant western feet don't fit into these things because I would, I know I would.

Tactile Text
Singapore Management University (SMU)
LKCSB Seminar Room 2.5 (Room 2012)
Friday, October 9, 2009
1 - 4:30 PM

Continuing on some of the experimental work being done for my Concept Development course at RMIT University Vietnam, I've decided to expand the visualizing information exercise into an arts workshop during my arts residency at the Singapore Management University.

Beginning with the poetry of Singaporean writer Cyril Wong, workshop participants will interrogate the text for information and inspiration that will carry on into the development of art projects. Given the short time frame of the workshop, it will be extremely condensed and I don't know what to expect. I suppose that we could develop prototypes and sketches for art works that might be realized later and/or devise scripts for performing the text.

On Saturday, I'll be giving a presentation on some recent projects including The Mekong at the Asia Pacific Triennial.

Welcome to the Jungle, Jim!
An artist talk by R. Streitmatter-Tran
Singapore Management University (SMU)
Seminar Room 3 (Room 3005)
School of Accountancy/School of Law
Saturday, October 10, 2009
1 - 2:30 PM

For the last year Queensland Art Gallery curator Russell Storer and I have been collaboratively developing a special platform for the latest Asia Pacific Triennial, it's 6th incarnation, launching this December in Brisbane, Australia. Simply called The Mekong, the project looks at connections among the Greater Mekong Subregion nations: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar - some transnational, others culturally specific, and others imagined.

I'll be writing more on the Mekong project, but a quick description of the project can be found on the QAG website, and is pasted here below:

The Mekong
Artists: Bùi Công Khánh, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Pich Sopheap, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Svay Ken, Tun Win Aung & Wah Nu, Vandy Rattana
Co-organised by Rich Streitmatter-Tran (Vietnam) and Russell Storer (Curator, Contemporary Asian art, Queensland Art Gallery)

The Mekong River is one of the longest rivers in Asia, running from its source in China, through the countries of Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Difficult to navigate, the Mekong has historically formed connections, as well as a border, between the peoples who live along its course. In recent years, with the growth of trade and investment, the development of roads and other communication networks and increased migration and exchanges of people, information and ideas, the region has become more integrated than ever before. The Mekong platform within APT6 presents a vivid, multi-layered view of a complex and rapidly transforming region, a place that is becoming increasingly prominent culturally, politically and economically. Key themes include changing societies and cultures, including tensions between tradition and modernity, and between Buddhist teachings and Western values. The shifting dynamics of nationhood and how this impacts on individuals and society is another concern for artists. The presentation will feature a range of media, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography and video.

Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6)
A general description of the Asia Pacific Triennial (also taken from the QAG site):

'The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' (APT6) will profile new commissions and recent work by more than 100 artists and filmmakers from over 25 countries across the region.

APT6 will include for the first time contemporary artists from North Korea (DPRK), Iran, Turkey, Tibet, Cambodia and Myanmar (Burma). Australian artists presented in APT6 are the Philippines-born, Brisbane-based husband-and-wife team Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan; the Melbourne collective DAMP; Raafat Ishak (Melbourne); and Tracey Moffatt, who lives and works in New York and on the Sunshine Coast.

APT6 will include three groundbreaking presentations: The Mansudae Art Studio project, co-curated with filmmaker Nicholas Bonner (UK/China), the first presentation in Australia of contemporary art from North Korea (DPRK); Pacific Reggae, co-curated with broadcaster Brent Clough (NZ/Australia), showcasing for the first time music and music video by reggae artists from Hawai'i, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia; and The Mekong, co-curated with artist Rich Streitmatter-Tran (Vietnam), featuring painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography and video from Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma).

Internationally acclaimed directors Ang Lee (Taiwan/USA), Rithy Panh (Cambodia/France) and Takeshi Kitano (Japan) are the filmmakers to be featured in the Australian Cinémathèque at the Gallery of Modern Art.

Information
QAG: The Mekong
QAG: The Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6)

The pair of photographs contribute to an ongoing series of works called The Jungle Books. A long-term project, borrowing its name from Rudyard Kipling's famous collection of stories, is basically a conceptual framework for art works that speak to life in the Mekong sub-region. Each work will draw inspiration and information from diverse sources and issues such as early colonial travelogues and fiction, early anthropology, the natural sciences, popular culture and tabloid trash, current news, local beliefs and mythologies and politics.

In this series, we find the endangered Giant Mekong Catfish washed ashore and expired as the people come to term with the unexpected arrival of a big problem. In the other photograph, Vietnam's first ever satellite has returned home, smoldering as people gaze upon the symbol of national ambition from the safety of their homes.

While the series speaks to the fluidity between fact and fiction, the photographs are fictions themselves, composited using 3D models. No attempt is made to be convincing. The artifice is to be celebrated.
----
Also, Gilles Massot (LaSalle College of the Arts) and I delivered a short artist presentation titled "Constructed Images: Simulacra in Southeast Asia) on May 29th. He brought up an interesting point that if the ecological conservation of the Mekong is not taken seriously, the Giant Mekong Catfish, like the Tasmanian tiger, will soon be as much a fiction as the photograph, and people will be flocking to Mekong theme parks to take photos and buy stuffed animals of the catfish, then existing solely as a simulacrum.

Artists: Nguyen Minh Phuoc, Nguyen Quang Huy, Nguyen Anh Tuan, Le Huy Hoang, Pham Ngoc Duong, Hoang Duong Cam, R. Streitmatter-Tran. Curated by Marie Terrieux

Title: A Snapshot of Contemporary Vietnamese Art
Venue: Ifa Gallery, Shanghai
Dates: 30 May - 20 July, 2009
Vernissage: 30 May 3-8pm
Info: www.ifa-gallery.com
9i9y9yvzab

Artists: Shannon Castelman, Chun Kai Qun, Chua Chye Tec, John Clang, Xavi Comas, Mark R. Kauffmann, Dominic Khoo, Ko Aung, Tung Mai, Nge Lay, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Samantha Tio, Francis Ng, Gilles Massot and students from Lasalle Faculty of Fine Arts. Curated by Patricia Levasseur.

Title: TransportAsian
Venue: Singapore Art Museum
Dates: 30 May - 11 August, 2009
Vernissage: 30 May 6pm
Info: www.singart.com

TransportAsian is a photography exhibition featuring works of artists from Southeast Asia.

The fusion of themes Transport and Asia presents a delightful array of works documenting the history of transportation. It also showcases each photographer's interpretation and metaphorical explorations of the theme. It is divided into four focuses in photography: Time, Space, Action and Fiction.

Vistors will be invited to experience a new perspective of photography that uses various surfaces, materials and even techniques. TransportAsian boasts works in media including prints, installations and multimedia.

TIME LIGAMENTS - Contemporary Vietnamese Artists
Exhibition dates: 14 May-16 August, 2009
Venue: 10 Chancery Lane Gallery ART PROJECTS and ANNEX
Chai Wan Industrial City Phase One, 6/F, 60 Wing Tai Road, Chai Wan, Hong Kong

Participating Artists:
Khanh Cong Bui, Tiffany Chung, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Christine Nguyen, Thi Trinh Nguyen,
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Tuan Thai Nguyen, Tu Duc Nguyen, Rich Streitmatter-Tran

Co-curated by Dinh Q. Lê and Zoe Butt in cooperation with San Art, Ho Chi Minh City

Circulating within our image-burdened world are creative wanderers that ponder the vestiges of mediated fact and control -- the crumbling layers of paint on government walls; the memory of a burning, martyred monk; the quasi-morphing of local habit with the experiential remnants of a 'European Elsewhere' -- these itinerant image makers of Vietnam contort such hidden shifts into concrete form in Time Ligaments.

In this exhibition nine perspectives grapple with the persisting memories of a country where the past stubbornly lingers in the literal and mental landscape of the everyday. Their stories traverse the experience of migration and return; the metamorphosis of popular foreign trend with local custom; the stymied struggle of resistance against historical ideas of social control; or the increasing urban dilettante whose material desires lay waste to their history and surroundings. Time is schizophrenically warped in the photographically paused moments of Tu Duc Nguyen, while Phu Nam Thuc Ha's lens captures the surfaces of crumbling government walls marveling at how time is the nascent agent of change. In Tuan Thai Nguyen's careful paintings, where working life holds hostage to ideas of individual social worth, a crouching headless figure dressed in office garb faces a corner of an empty room. Such psychological influence of a neo-liberal world is also of great import in the gouache rendered drawings of Khanh Cong Bui and the conceptual sculptures of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, where ideas of deterioration and control are given broader metaphorical context in examining how the tools of a game operate as political strategy in pacifying conflict and terror, not just in Vietnam.

This is but a brief glance of the layered complex narratives in this exhibition where nine provocative artists will be showcased through painting, video, photography, sculptural installation and works on paper.

Title: Lao Tzu Dreams of the LHC (2009)

Sculpture. Stainless steel, copper, brass

The installation began with an observation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most expensive scientific endeavor to date. The LHC is a particle accelerator whose mission is to replicate the conditions of the universe during the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, and to validate our current models explaining the nature of reality. Particular components of the LHC appear strangely similar in form to the Ba Qua mirrors used in Feng Shui geomancy found throughout Asia that aim to properly align natural forces. Both the LHC and the Ba Qua mirrors aim to harness and understand the power of nature and yet are tools separated by thousands of years.

Some of most recent observations of the quantum world are also very close to descriptions found in the ancient texts, such as the I Ching (Book of Changes) and the Tao Te Ching, such as the fundamental nature of all things being movement and change. The number 8 has for long been considered lucky and primary to the Chinese as the trigrams represents all possible human and cosmic interactions. Eight has also become fundamental to our modern conditions, as the number has become the cornerstone of the binary code of our digital world (for example, 8, 32, 64-bit), and it has extended beyond into other areas of thought such as the 8-fold path in Buddhism.

This installation reconsiders the unique relationship between ancient texts and the most advanced cutting-edge frontiers of science and wonders if both are the same, as if Lao Tzu had once dreamed of such an experiment.

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory... [we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. - Neils Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.

Similarities in visual form: The LHC and the Ba Qua

Work in progress

Work in progress. Completion of the polygonal faces

Opening night at the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Annex

A view through the sculpture