Lot #16, Mary Temple, Corner Light (Miami), 2008. Hand-cut translucent abaca on Arches, colored pencil on verso. Courtesy of Artist and Mixed Greens Gallery.

A week’s worth of heartfelt culture picks…

TONIGHT: Lower East Side Printshop benefit. Works donated include pieces by Jim Dine, Robert Longo, Dana Schutz, James Siena, Nancy Spero, among others. We love the Mary Temple piece being auctioned, above. 6-9pm.

Thursday, February 12th: Voting closes for Reel 13’s Valentine’s week short film competition for the NYC area. We’ll be casting our ballots for Gibson Frazier’s delightful taxicab/toreador romance, Yellow. Voting closes at 5pm.

Sound-art pioneer Bill Fontana’s Spiraling Echoes opens in San Francisco’s City Hall Rotunda. Spiraling Echoes uses echolocation via ultrasound beams to carry a soundtrack of contemporary and historic sounds from various San Francisco events and locations around the Rotunda’s space. Opening reception, 5:30-7:30pm. free

Friday, February 13th: Social Media Week closing party at Santos Party House. 7-10pm. free

Also tonight: Gregory de la Haba’s pagan horse installation, Equus Maximus, opens at Jack The Pelican. NSFW!

Saturday, February 14th: the last weekend to catch Tadashi Kawamata’s wooden “Tree Huts” at Madison Square Park. Grab a burger at Shake Shack with your date and imagine spending your Valentines day like the Swiss Family Robinson. Free (burger not included).

Two of Tadashi Kawabata's Tree Huts, 2008. (Madison Sq. Park Conservancy)

If you’re in a more literary mood, check out the Bushwick Reading Series every second Saturday of the month, co-curated by Bushwick residents Niina Pollari and Parker Phillips at the Bushwick library, housed in a beautiful 1908 Carnegie building. 3-5pm. Free

MoMA presents Third World Newsreel’s (TWN) New Work from New Filmmakers, including Lottie Porch and Vanara Taing’s Beyond the Music, about the Inspirational Choir of New York’s Riverside Church. TWN fosters independent film and video by and about diverse communities, with a focus on people of color and social justice issues. 8pm.

Monday and Tuesday, February 16th and 17th: Dan Graham (2/16) and Shirin Neshat (2/17) speak about their work as part of the San Francisco Art Institute’s Spring 2009 Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series. 7:30pm, Free.

Tuesday, February 17th: Don’t miss Chiara Clemente’s Our City Dreams, a love letter to New York City through the eyes of five generations of women artists. Today’s screening includes a Q&A with Clemente and Ghada Amer. At the Film Forum, 1:15, 3:15, 6:00, 8:00, 10:00pm.

Additional: The Foundation Vevey Ville d’Images has opened their call for entries for its 7th Vevey International Photo Awards. Projects that receive the approximately $25,000 worth of awards will be completed and shown at the next edition of the festival Images in September 2010. Deadline for the submission of projects is April 30, 2009.

Tags: Bill Fontana, Bushwick Reading Series, City Hall rotunda, Dan Graham, documentary, Film, Lower East Side Printshop, Madison Square Park, MoMA, Reel 13, romance, Shake Shack, Shirin Neshat, Social Media Week, Tadashi Kawamata, Third World Newsreel, tree huts, Yellow.

transPOP: KOREA VIETNAM REMIX is a sprawling and ambitious cross-section of works by sixteen contemporary Korean and Vietnamese artists, which recently opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco after traveling from Seoul, Ho Chi Minh City, and southern California.

Manh Hung Nguyen, Go To Market, (2004). Acrylic on canvas, 39 1/4 x 39 1/4 in. Courtesy of artist.

Curators Viet Le and Yong Soon Min chose to focus on the two countries’ “shared history of a highly accelerated modernization process with militarized roots and the Cold War”, and the “increased cross-pollination of cultural influence and exchange” between Vietnam, Korea and the United States.

Because of my background, an American child of Chinese parents who were part of the Vietnamese diaspora of the late 1970s, I’m aware of arriving at the gallery with a certain amount of expectation. Having visited Vietnam some years ago, I frequented museums in Ho Chi Minh City filled with nationalistic artwork rendered in a range of perfectly-studied techniques, which either glorified the pastoral, agricultural lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in travelogues, or categorically condemned the atrocities of the Vietnam War.

With transPOP, I was especially interested in seeing artworks that reflected a homegrown, post-embargo Vietnamese popular culture, artworks which explored or critiqued a described spirit of “accelerated modernity” that, if not completely independent of propagandist bent, at least had subtlety of message. What I found was that, perhaps despite the best efforts of the curators, a well-edited timeline and even an addition of a resource room with relevant books, posters and media about the current “Viet-Pop” and “Korean Wave” movements, I couldn’t get past how much of the actual artwork in the show centered around the nations’ distinctive wartime past, rather than on a present-day exchange of contemporary cultural elements. For example, a majority of Min-Hwa Choi’s paintings that were exhibited referenced events like the 1972 napalm bombing of Trang Bang, and the aftermath of Fascism. The aim of these paintings seemed too similar to the sort of overt, literal critique of Communism evident in the recent wave of contemporary Chinese art, and were not as successful as Choi’s figurative portraits of disaffected, modern Koreans from her To the Rocker series.

Min-Hwa Choi, Lying on Fascism, 2005. oil on canvas. Courtesy of artist.

There were a number of works which were exceptions. My favorite piece in the show was Yong-Baek Lee’s Angel Soldier, a wall-sized video projection of a floral print backdrop with suspended “vines” of flowers blending into the backdrop, accompanied by a soundtrack of forest sounds. Several minutes into the video, soldiers dressed in floral-printed camouflage slowly, inexorably traveled carefully across the frame, hunched as if stalking an enemy. Lee’s other video, Steaming Out (Post-IMF), channels the self-administered obstacles of early Nauman videos; created in response to the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997, it now reads as a prescient comment on our current economic climate.

Yong-Baek Lee, Angel Soldier, 2005. Single Channel Video Projection. ArtNet.com image, Courtesy Arario Gallery

Manh Hung Nguyen’s pop-colored canvases, which poked light fun at the blending of Western technology with Vietnamese agricultural life, were also enjoyable. “Building” depicts a high-rise condo mash-up of the country’s traditional tin awnings and huts in the sky, commercial planes flying by.

Manh Hung Nguyen, Building, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 39 1/4 x 39 1/4 inches. Courtesy of artist

Eventually, the realization came that the shadow of the Cold War that I’d expected transPOP’s artists to have shed was intrinsic to their practice, as inescapable as the paintings of fields and farmers in the museums of Ho Chi Minh City. Yet there were still many provocative works in the exhibition which successfully managed to both acknowledge the historical impact of the war, as well as leave room for the viewer to meditate on its repercussions in Korean and Vietnamese society today.

An-My Lê’s documentation of the U.S. military’s training exercises in preparation for combat in Iraq (29 Palms) alludes to the parallels between the wars, eerily blurring our ability to discern the difference between real and staged battles.

An-My Lê, From 29 Palms, 2005, © An-My Lê, Courtesy of Murray Guy

In his powerful film, The Farmers and The Helicopters,  Dinh Q. Le examines the potent symbolism of the helicopter as both a tool of destruction and the embodiment of his countrymen’s dreams of economic and community revival. While the current pop music and film industry of Korea and Vietnam reflects the cultural progress that these countries have achieved, it is video pieces like Le’s and Baek’s that contribute something much more substantive towards a real dialogue about its future.

Dinh Q. Lê, Tran Quoc Hai and Le Van Danh, The Farmers and the Helicopters, 2006. Three channel video installation. In collaboration with Ha Thuc Phu Nam and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. ©Stills: Dinh Q. Lê

Among the elements of Lin + Lam’s Unidentified Vietnam series, a remixed clip from a South Vietnamese propaganda film is spliced with clips of one of the artists dressed as the protagonists in the film. Quotes from the novel The Quiet American appear onscreen, in ambiguous contrast to the nature of the video being watched.

Lin + Lam, detail from Unidentified Vietnam (Invisible Like Peace), 2003-present. Multi-media installation. Image courtesy of artists.

“In way you could say they died for democracy, he said. “I wouldn’t know how to translate that into Vietnamese.”

The twenty-four abstract, black and white film stills from a second of this footage “(24 Frames=1 Second)”, implies, at least to this viewer, that while the world continues to fix this nation to a singular political or cultural moment, those events too will become transient, as Vietnam’s story continues to evolve.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Dec 6, 2008 – Mar 15, 2009

Tags: An My Le, Art, California, Chinese, Cold War, contemporary art, Dinh Q. Le, Film, Ho Chi Minh City, Korea, Korean, Korean Wave, Lin + Lam, Manh Hung Nguyen, military, Min Hwa Choi, music, painting, political, popular culture, remix, San Francisco, Seoul, transPOP, United States, video, Viet Le, Viet Pop, Vietnam, Vietnam War, Vietnamese, Yerba Buena Center, Yong Baek Lee, Yong Soon Min.