week 8

In a work commissioned for the 2001 Yokohama Triennale of Contemporary Art (and also presented at the S?o Paolo and Sydney Biennials), Jan Nguyen-Hatsushiba focused on cyclo drivers in his video project, Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex-For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards (2001). Filmed on location in Vietnam?s Indochina Sea, this remarkable 13-minute video depicts a number of young men struggling to propel cyclos across the rock-strewn, sandy, ocean bottom. Working in teams, they pull, push, and pedal the passengerless vehicles; and periodically they must rush up to the surface for air or risk drowning. The water grows deeper; the boulders get larger; the trip to the surface takes longer; and the task is increasingly arduous. Finally, the drivers abandon their cyclos, and swim together toward an underwater ?city? composed of tents made from white netting strung between boulders, a metaphorical memorial for the many Vietnamese boat people drowned in the aftermath of the war.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s video work, Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex—For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards, was filmed in 2001 on the southeast coast of Vietnam. This was the artist’s first video work and offers captivating images of local fishermen pulling cyclos (rickshaws) underwater toward an area where the artist stretched about thirty mosquito nets across the sea bed. The cyclos, submerged in deep water, represent the weight of tradition and reference Vietnam’s historical past in the context of the country’s struggle with the processes of modernization.

Nguyen-Hatsushiba was born in 1968 in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and a Vietnamese father. His family moved to Texas when he was nine years old, and he received formal training in painting in the United States before moving to Vietnam in 1996. He now lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.



http://artscal.mit.edu/index.php?template=1&fulltext=film&start=20080801&end=20091231&id=11280004

http://sites.asiasociety.org/arts/nh/index.html

Banksy is a pseudonymous[2][3][4] British graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol[2] and to have been born in 1974,[5] but his identity is unknown.[6] According to Tristan Manco[who?], Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s."[7] His artworks are often satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique, is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His art has appeared in cities around the world.[8] Banksy's work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.

Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti.[9] Art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy

Last blog question for semester one- Banksy's work


How can we categorize Banksy's work -graffiti or murals?

Research Banksy's work to attempt to answer this question.
What are some of the differing opinions about Banksy's work?
How does his work sit in relation to consumerism? Can his work be sold?
What are some of his attitudes to the sale of Art?
Who is Banksy? Do we know his true identity?
Upload 2-3 images of Banksy's work that you find interesting, and comment
on the ideas behind the work.