Interview: Business as usual - Hanoi Future Art.

Business as usual</i<, 2009. Installation view.

Toke, can you give a brief introduction to the exhibition, and how it was curated?

Toke Lykkeberg: The exhibition is the product of a workshop where Danish and Vietnamese artists have been encouraged to present, reflect upon and discuss their work. The production of the exhibition has thus been punctuated by daily meetings where we have been talking everything over. One of my concerns has been to find a balance so that the talks could enrich and encourage the making of art instead of supplanting it. Another concern has been to create a real dialogue between these artists from very divergent cultural backgrounds. Therefore we have had to find a common ground without lowering the level. This common ground was the commercial culture that we are all part of and that one might experience as rampant in Vietnam as well as in Denmark. From this starting point we came up with the show’s basic and rather twisted idea, namely to turn the art space into a shop that we would once again turn into an art space. It has been our hope that something would happen with the art space in the process, of course. And I think something did happen. By placing art within a shop, we tried to appeal to the art lover within the shopper. This was important since the shoppers by far outnumber the almost non-existing art public in Hanoi. Nevertheless more art lovers than shoppers might have seen the exhibition. But maybe the art public might have gotten something out of this framing of art also, namely that inside the art lover there’s also a shopper. Fine arts and commercial culture both offer aesthetic experiences that can be hard to tell from each other and that is a point in itself.

Since the actualization of the project took place in Hanoi, and you went there and worked directly with the artists, a substantial part of the project had to be curated on site in Hanoi. How was that?

Toke Lykkeberg: Though I had had many meetings with the Danish artists before we left for Hanoi, the ideas that we had developed beforehand were open-ended. For instance, I had been talking with the Danish artists before we left about making a shop, but it was not until we came to Hanoi and discussed various other ideas with the Vietnamese artists we found out why this idea was actually pretty good. I found Vietnamese culture even more commercial than I had imagined. The fact that it is very hard to get the so-called real thing whether it be Armani, Samsonite or North Face in Hanoi in a way shows how important it is for us today to get the right brand. The real thing was paradoxically even more present, because there were fakes and copies everywhere in the boutiques with oversize logos that referred to this very attractive commercial universe. Though big brands try to fight the copy industry, the copy culture is nevertheless a tribute to the real thing. In this climate it is of course interesting to make a shop that is not a real shop but rather artificial and artistic. And that also makes curating interesting. My role was easily understood by reference to commercial culture and communication. None of the Vietnamese artists had heard about curators before, but we found out that they could easily relate to what I was doing. Ngoc, who is gaining a living as an event manager, put it nicely: “So actually you’re doing what I’m doing. You’re organising events.”

Work by Anne Bennike.		Business as usual, 2009. Installation view.

How was the group dynamics between the Vietnamese and Danish artists, and the balance between collective and individual art works?

Toke Lykkeberg: Well, since we did a workshop, the process was very important to us. This was where the cultural and artistic exchange between the artists took place. But it was also very important that the process was directed towards the production of art works, because the production of pieces ensures that there is also an exchange between the artists and the public. In the contemporary art world there’s such a great emphasis on workshops and the creative process itself that the public is sometimes left out. We wanted to counter this by facilitating these different exchanges through the production of three different categories of art works. One category was the big collective artwork which is signed by no one - and that is the shop. Another category was collaborative art works within the shop such as the long drawing that Anne and Huong co-signed. The third category was individual works signed by only one artist such as Theis’ fire extinguisher. I know that such a categorization sounds very rigid, but for me it was important that the artists both got to articulate some visions together while developing their entirely own ideas. However, what I particularly liked was to see how the individual works got better when the artists assisted each other. Ngoc, for instance, first arrived at articulating herself brillantly, when she narrowed down the scope of her ideas seemingly inspired by Søren’s minimal work, that nevertheless in no way resembles Ngoc’s. It was very satisfying witnessing how collaborative work influenced and helped shape genuinely individual visions.

How do you see the differences in the conceptions of art in Denmark and Vietnam, and how did you experience it?

Toke Lykkeberg: Well, in Denmark, in the 20th century, a lot has been done to make sure that artists can speak their own mind. In Vietnam, in the same period, artists have always in some way had to serve someone else, not themselves. First they produced art for the French colonizers, then they made art in the name of the communist revolution and later, today, a lot of artwork is once again made to serve the interests of foreigners, though this time around it’s often the tourists. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese artists I have been working with really wanted to speak their mind just like the Danish artists. The difference is that these Danish artists have been taught different artistic languages at art school that help them to articulate the problems that are uppermost in their minds, whereas the Vietnamese artists do not have access to such a wide variety of languages. The languages they know and speak are rather old. Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock are still heroes in Hanoi. Of course, those are great artists, but it is rather difficult to express new content through these old forms since the form in itself is already content.

Work by Anne Bennike.		Work by Anne Bennike & Nguyen Minh Dieu Huong.

Anne, can you tell about the collaboration you made with Huong, how it came about and what the subject matter of you drawing project is?

Anne Bennike: At the start of the project at Hanoi Future Art, Huong and I talked about that it could be funny to try to make some drawing together. I have been drawing for many years and think it is a very interesting way to communicate. When individuals collaborate, they speak together in another language than words. It’s a very special way to get to know each other. To begin with, we had no idea what our drawing should be about, so we just started. I started to draw some hair and Huong drew some flowers coming from the hair and then a story began, so we where from then on drawing and talking. We made a 10 meter long drawing about a girl driving a scooter and what she is thinking, and a boy that is dreaming. Her thoughts and his dreams are meeting and then the story goes on afterwards with what happens in their real life together. I have never tried to make a drawing series in this way. In a way it’s made like a movie. I was very surprised about how fast Huong got on with drawing and that our ideas was flowing so well, since she hadn’t been drawing much before.

The story is about a girl’s thoughts and a boy’s dreams, and how different they somehow are. The girl’s thoughts are more romantic in a superficial way and the boy’s are more rough and mean somehow. When they are coming together in the real life everything goes wrong: She is power-shopping, buying kids and he, maybe, is not really ready. He is drinking and she is shopping and he beats her and so on. It seems like they haven’t really found themselves, and that’s the subject of the drawing; that many women and men don’t manage to find out who they are and what they need to be satisfied. I have the feeling that many follow the same old patterns and play different roles like life was a theatre. Many men and women often don’t listen to each other or respect each other and that’s a pity. Huong and I talked about how important it is to be in touch with yourself and not just do things because other people expect it from you - things that don’t even matter in their lives, but actually really mean something in your life.

I got many thoughts while doing this drawing with Huong and we talked about how some problems are similar even when you live in two different societies. Issues like violence in love relationships and so on are happening in the West and in the East as well as in the South and the North. In the West there’s a very high number of men beating their wives and that is more or less the same problem in the whole world. The subject of the story is that we, woman and man, should help and respect each other instead of forcing old patterns and expectations upon each other. More easily said than done, we know...

You brought a lot of Danish trash with you to Vietnam to use in the exhibition. Can you tell more about that, and why you did it?

Anne Bennike: I think that trash tells a lot about the society that it comes from. In Denmark people are throwing completely new things out. I am very shocked to see what gets thrown out. In one end of the world people are starving, and in the other end of the world people are throwing out a whole new home just because it’s last year’s design. I decided to bring along some thrash from Denmark and look at the trash in Vietnam and then build it together as a cultural meeting of trash. In Vietnam I was very surprised to see to what extent everything gets used and how the leftover is really trash. Trash also tells the story of the everyday life in a country and stories about the people who throw it out. Thrash can be like a kind of newspaper.

You have a lot of experience doing collective projects. What do you think is the potential of collaborations?

Anne Bennike: I think that the potential of collaborations is that it can move your mind faster than if you are on your own - or that is what I experience, most of the time. In the West we are more and more taught to be very individual. We are not taught to think of the whole thing as a lot of very small things that all stick together. Therefore, in the start, it can be very provocative. Collaborations test our personal limits, but I think that it is healthy and most of the time when I have been working collaboratively, I have been given so much back, gotten input and ideas I would never have thought of myself. Surprising things happen, this is the part of it I find very interesting. Of course, you have to somehow have the ability to work collaboratively. Otherwise it can be a very frustrating experience, and that I have also tried, but if you are open and can let go of yourself, it can be an amazing experience. As an artist, I personally believe that it’s rare that you actually get your ideas by yourself. You are most of the time influenced or inspired from something outside of yourself, and what comes from inside is often very basic things. To be honest, I don’t think we are worth much completely alone with ourselves. I believe the mind would get very empty after a while. But, of course, it is also important to do things on your own and have time to reflect. I think both are good processes for one’s personal and artistic development. But I think it’s a pity that everything in our society is so focused on the individual - it’s a really poor thing for everybody, actually.

Work by Anne Bennike & Nguyen Minh Dieu Huong.		Work by Anne Bennike & Nguyen Minh Dieu Huong.

Huong, how did you experience the collaboration with the other artists?

Nguyen Minh Dieu Huong: Well, this was the first time I do a collaboration with other artists and the first time I did a exhibition too. I felt so lucky when I had a chance to collaborate with Danish artists and even Vietnamese artists. I have learned how to make a workshop, draw, do everything together and know how to collaborate between 2 different cultures, European and Asian. And of course, I have made friends with many good guys.

How did you experience your work drawing with Anne?

Nguyen Minh Dieu Huong: Anne’s a great artist. She always made me comfortable when we were drawing. We share a lot of the same opinions, ideas and thinking about life, love or just about women's stuff. And I’ve learned so much from the way she worked. She was like my teacher, taught me the way to do draw, trust myself and do art. I want to say thanks to her.

What was the drawing you made in collaboration about?

Nguyen Minh Dieu Huong: The drawing is about love, the relationship between the woman and the man. It starts with two images of a girl and a boy. The girl's thinking about girl's stuff: love, something's pink, nice, and colourful. And the boy's sleeping and dreaming about boy's stuffs: fighting, drugs and of course about women. And when these two kinds of thinking meet together, something sweet like love happen. Then they marry together, everything about real life start. Lost freedom, money problems, unfaithfulness, fighting, divorce. In the end, both of them are on the way to finding their own new lives.

I think its all about the way you chose to live, decide what you want to do. Lets live and see: what will happen?

Will you do more art in the future?

Nguyen Minh Dieu Huong: I think I will.

Work by Theis Wendt.		Work by Theis Wendt.

Theis, can you explain your installation that used the water tank under the ground floor, and how you worked with the relation between public and private space in that piece?

Theis Wendt: I have done works before about the degradation of the public sphere in connection with the growing privatisation. One subject that interests me about public space is the limits of behavioural patterns and movement among people. I thought it would be interesting to work with the same theme in Hanoi that I have worked with in Copenhagen. I was of course confronted with a lot of new problems and issues. If we look at traffic, for example, the normal behaviour in Denmark is to follow the traffic laws whereas in Vietnam it is normal to break them, which creates an autonomous way of navigating through the streets. That makes traffic into a self-organizing organism, which I find very interesting and at the same time intimidating. The installation is a play with space, function and expectation. It combines materials we know from the public as well as the private sphere - a construction site and a living room rug. The piece is site-specific and uses both the given exhibition space and the water tank under the floor. The warning lights create a serious atmosphere in the room, but when you look closer nothing is wrong and nothing is happening, the worker is just standing there – hanging out in the water, gazing into the darkness. I like the idea of a worker, not working and escaped from duty, but still in uniform, therefore related to some kind of function, or seen from the viewer’s eyes an expectation of function. The work doesn’t tell anything about what needs repairing or what he is doing, it actually just shows illogical behaviour, in a situation normally related to logical thinking.

A striking thing about the bamboo shop, the collectively produced framework, was that it was made in a way as to deny art as being art as craftsmanship, consciously building the installation in a bad way, combining wrong materials such as sticky tape and bamboo. Can you explain a little about this, and why it was made that way?

Theis Wendt: The whole idea of constructing another space in the gallery was an attempt to define a “neutral” space together, where we could meet each other on “equal” ground. Being an artist from a Western society you always have the knowledge and history of the “white cube” in mind. Therefore you act upon that, consciously or unconsciously, when exhibiting in a gallery. In Vietnam, that frame of reference is not normal and since the main goal of this project was to exchange cultural and artistic experiences and work collectively, that part of history wasn’t really important. We thought that changing the exhibition space together would make good sense. A crucial thing about the shop was its function as a frame to present individual art works, which I think was important in this project, because it was a way of presenting works to each other, which demanded a more difficult reading. For me the slower reading creates curiosity, which I think has a great potential, when we are talking about any kind of meeting between two groups of very different people. The construction was built the way it was because the function of the shop wasn’t about selling products, but another way of presenting artworks to reflect upon. The combination of materials was a way to define the construction as ours.

How did you experience the actual collaboration with the Vietnamese artists?

Theis Wendt: We had some translating delays back and forth and like I was talking about before concerning not having the same frame of reference, we had some communication problems. We used a lot of time having meetings, trying to understand each other. It was a good, but hard experience being forced to explain every little detail about what you wanted to work with and why.

Hoai Anh, you have been working both with Death Metal and art. What is the connection between art and music for you?

Pham Hoai Anh: Music and art are just two ways I express myself, I talk what I can't talk in words. My passion is Death Metal and I have been playing it for more than 10 years now. And besides music, I also do painting and it's also a way to communicate with other people my thought and my life.

I have been working with some other friends who are painters in an idea to combine paintings, video art and music, sound art to tell people about what we think about life and art. 

How did you experience the collaboration with the other artists?

Pham Hoai Anh: This is not the first time I work with other artists, but it's the first time I work with artists from Denmark. It's a good experience for me to work with them and to know more about Danish art, especially contemporary art. I really like the way we all work on the frame together then make some artwork inside it.

What do you think the future of Vietnamese art is?

Pham Hoai Anh: The future of Vietnamese art is the future of Vietnam.

Work by Vuong Bich Ngoc.

Ngoc, can you explain the Vietnamese tradition of making shrines for the ancestors?

Vuong Bich Ngoc: Vietnamese people believe that life after death is the same as life on earth, which means people also need things they need when they are alive. And with that thinking, people make things from paper, bamboo or wood... to burn to send to their ancestors. I can't tell exactly when this became so common that people started making motorbikes, cars, mobile phone and even a big house - to burn. But I think it in the past ten years. Before that we only have some simple money made from paper.

What is your view on the ancestor tradition, and how did you use it in your artwork? What is the message?

Vuong Bich Ngoc: I don't believe that what we burn here on earth would be sent somewhere and someone who died would get it and can use it. When it is something belongs to religious belief, I would say people have the right to choose, but it should be as simple as possible to reduce the burning which is a big waste of money and causes pollution.

My artwork raises the question: Do your ancestors receive what you send? And are they happy with it or not? The video piece I shoot myself with a paper hat on and paper dress. But behind the mask, I smile happily and I am also sad. I make the video change slowly sometimes to give some surprised to the audience.

What did you think of the collaboration with the other artists? Has it changed you view on art?

Vuong Bich Ngoc: I really enjoy the days working with all the artists from Denmark. They teach me a lot about Danish modern art through their artwork. And, I learn to work with artists for the first time in an art project also. I am not an artist, so it is a great experience to know more about them and their work and life.

My view of art is there shouldn't be any fix definition for art. So, I should say what I learn after the project just adds to my thinking about art, not change it. And more important, it inspired me a lot to continue to work on some other ideas, one of which I am working on right now, a multimedia art piece.  

Work by Søren Thilo Funder & Pham Hoai Anh.		Work by Søren Thilo Funder.

Søren, can you give a brief explanation of the 3 video works that you made on site in Hanoi for the exhibition?

Søren Thilo Funder: In the video Quai Vat Means Monster I set out to create what I call a translation of a translation process. In the video I direct the Vietnamese artist Hoai Ahn, through an interpreter, to perform the Nirvana song Where did you sleep last night. The video seeks to illuminate the various power plays that unfold in a cultural meeting and in the development of art - especially involving the participation of other personas than the artist him- or herself. The roles of power constantly switch in this - on the surface - small video in the tension between director and performer, artist and medium, translation and distortion, portraiture and authorship. 

Badminton, Lenin Square, July 18th 2009 is displayed as a small video postcard. The short archived moment depicts a typical night at Lenin Square in Hanoi, where the people enjoy leisure time on the square in front of the monumental statue of Lenin. The small undramatic scene unveils the ubiquitous - global - presence of an overshadowing history and illustrates the past as it unfolds in the present or vice versa. 

In Hip Hop For My Ancestors a Sony Stereo made out of paper is slowly catching fire. The ritual of burning daily commodities made out of paper, to satisfy ones ancestors living in a parallel afterlife, is as much an indicator of the presence of tradition and believe as it indicates the commodity societies influence on the traditional. The branded world has found its way to the simulated paper world and can be sacrificed. The ancestor sacrifice is in Hip Hop For My Ancestors a sacrifice of a source of cultural and philosophical influence and the receivers could be a line of influential people for me, such as historical political leaders and thinkers, that never lived to experience this source of critical identity development that is Hip Hop.

An aspect of the bamboo shop, the collectively produced framework, was that it in a way denied the illusion of being a real shop, and gave away that it was a construction done inside a gallery space.  Can you explain the idea behind that?

Søren Thilo Funder: The construction method of this simulated environment was arranged to highlight the simulation. I think that the utopia of creating "full on" common ground inside any group of people is a dangerous thing if it is forcefully fulfilled. The cynical and clinical homogeneous ground that would be created in this utopian quest can in no way free itself from a governing identity. The goal was no doubt to create an environment that would strive towards an equal space for expression, but to let this simulation become a claimed reality would be to lie about the diversity of the meeting. The cracks in the construction of an equal space must be highlighted to enable a room for the public to project their own images of utopian spaces into and respectfully create individual space within the collective.

As you said in an interview with Vietnamese television, the exhibition did not have a message as such, but rather tried to raise questions. What questions where raised in the exhibition? 


Søren Thilo Funder: The most forward question of the exhibition and perhaps also the most collectively asked question could be: What new reflective spaces can rise from the meeting between different people and artists? For me the question follows into a question of traditional institutions versus groundbreaking alternatives. A new question raises itself here: Can any new alternative rise from anywhere else than the same kind of traditions it confronts? And how do you create a rupture with something fixed, without leaning on other fixed structures? I do not think that these are questions that can or should be immediately answered but set forward they appeal to thought experiments perhaps enabling new spaces of freedom.

Work by Søren Thilo Funder.