Thursday, March 24, 2011

Saturday, March 19, 2011

aSaigon/CreativeMorning III - Dinh Q. Lê

Reprinted from the blog, Studio Mads Monsen.


Brilliant. Inspired. Moving. It was simply a great presentation and the early birds of Saigon enjoyed it. “I’m lovin’ it” to quote McDonald's, however, it was a far better deal. Unwrap a burger and you get disappointed as it never lives up to the tasty, juicy advertising image that sells you the deal in the first place.

The Early Birds
Dinh unwrapped his thinking and reason behind his works. His research methods? Obsession he answered.

Multi-media with Dinh Q. Le
His work on Agent Orange was nothing but brilliant. His latest projects include exploring the visual language around us. If people with a voice can find a way around to get noticed, artists can too. He proved that with his Agent Orange shop example - a real shop in Vietnam that sold cute little outfits for agent orange babies, like double hooded jackets and sweaters with teddy bears and flowers on them. Cute, but scary in that the usage could be real.

That looks nice. A box?
Our lucky-draw prize. From TIKI.VN. Guess what?

Portrait - Dinh Q. Le
Overall, a great start of the day, all thanks to the humble and yet so talented Dinh Q.Le

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Location for Friday: Stella Caffe, 119 Bui Vien Street, D1, HCMC

Sorry for the delay all. The location for Friday's meeting is Stella Caffe, 119 Bui Vien Street, D1, HCMC. Stella is a fine Italian restaurant with what I consider to be the best Ceasar salad in town, but that might not be your breakfast choice. When you arrive, be sure to take stairs in front to the upstairs meeting room. We'll CU there at 8:30am, sharp!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Lucky-Draw from Tiki.vn!


Thanks to Sonny at TIKI.VN, Vietnam's online bookshop, our next session on March 18 with Dinh Q. Le will feature a lucky-draw for the book:


IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation. There isn't a business in the world that doesn't want to be more creative in its thinking, products, and processes. At many companies, being first with a concept and first to market are critical just to survive. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley, general manager of the Silicon Valley based design firm IDEO, takes readers behind the scenes of this wildly imaginative and energized company to reveal the strategies and secrets it uses to turn out hit after hit.

Be sure to bring a business card for the lucky-draw, or we might decide to award it based on the results of a wet t-shirt contest.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

From the New York Times: More about Dinh Q. Lê




ART REVIEW

Vietnamese Voices Against a Whir of War



In slumberous mid-August thousands of visitors fidget and drift through the Museum of Modern Art, finding almost everything worth photographing and almost nothing worth more than a point-and-shoot glance. But in one gallery — basically a wide glorified corridor — people tend to stop, focus, even settle down in front of a three-channel video by the Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Le projected across a long wall.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
“Projects 93: Dinh Q. Le” at the Museum of Modern Art includes a helicopter built from scratch, right, and a three-channel video by Mr. Le.

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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Dinh Q. Le’s video at MoMA, “The Farmers and the Helicopters,” intersperses noisy war scenes with recent interviews with Vietnamese people.
Titled “The Farmers and the Helicopters,” the video is partly and spectacularly about the Vietnam War. We first see a panning shot of forests and rice paddies in aerial view. Then helicopters arrive, swarming, landing, lifting off, buzzing and shuddering through the sky, spewing men and rockets, crashing explosively, then rising to buzz some more. Classic shock and awe.
Interspersed with these noisy scenes are recent interviews with Vietnamese people. A former Vietcong soldier recalls how, more than 40 years ago, he shot at an American chopper to make it go away, and it did. A woman describes her first sight of an American helicopter around the same time. She was so disconcerted as it hovered over her that she could only look up at the pilot and smile.
A younger man, a self-taught mechanic named Tran Quoc Hai, speaks of his lifelong infatuation with such flying machines. He says that after studying old examples in Vietnam war museums and doing some Internet research he teamed up with a farmer friend and built a helicopter from scratch, for commercial use, but also to serve as a positive symbol of his country in the contemporary world.
As it happens, we can see this symbol firsthand; it’s installed in a gallery next to where the video is playing. And the two pieces constitute Mr. Le’s solo show, part of MoMA’s Projects series. 



Friday, March 4, 2011

aSaigon/CreativeMorning welcomes Dinh Q. Lê, 18 March, 2011, 8:30am

Dinh Q. Lê in collaboration with Tran Quoc Hai,
Le Van Danh, Phu-Nam Thuc Ha, and 

Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Still from The Farmers 
and The Helicopters. 2006. Three-channel video 
(color, sound), 15 min., and helicopter. 
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 
Dinh Q. Lê was born in Ha-Tien, Vietnam in 1968. He received his BA in Art studio at UC Santa Barbara in 1989 and his MFA in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1992. In 1993, Lê returned to Vietnam and settled in Ho Chi Minh City in 1996. - - -  Lê’ s work has been exhibited worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include, 'A Tapestry of Memories': at the Bellevue Art Museum, Washington State; 'Destination for the New Millennium', at the Asia Society, New York and  'Project 93': Dinh Q. Lê at MoMA, New York City.

His has also been included in the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2009 - City Visions Festival, Mechelen, Belgium; 2009 - Cuvee Biennale, Linz, Austria; 2008 - The Singapore Biennale - Thermocline of Art exhibition at ZKM in Germany - The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial at Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane Australia - 'Universal Experience' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; The Gwangju Biennial 2006, Korea - 'Persistent Vestiges': Drawings from the American-Vietnam War, The Drawing Center, New York - 'Infinite Painting', Villa Manin, Italy; 'Only Skin Deep' at the International Center for Photography, New York; Delays and Revolutions, Venice Biennale 2003.

His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; The Bronx Museum, New York; Singapore Art Museum; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; The Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. - - - Lê has also co-founded Vietnam Art Foundation-VNFA based in L.A., an organization that supports Vietnamese artists and promotes artistic exchange between cultural workers from Vietnam and the world. As an extension of VNFA, Lê and three other artists co-founded San Art, a non-profit gallery in Ho Chi Minh City. He is currently a board member of the Art Network Asia and Danish Embassy’s Cultural Development & Exchange Fund, and a member of the Asia Society’ s international council.




Sponsors include Malongo Coffee and The Tin Foil Grill. Location to be announced

Adrian Jones in The Word online


From Software to Vietnamese Art
Written by David Everitt-Carlson    Friday, 04 March 2011 06:13   PDFPrintE-mail
From software to Vietnamese art
FROM SOFTWARE TO VIETNAMESE ART

This month, The Word Magazine/Saigon profiles Adrian Jones, our last speaker at   
 aSaigon/CreativeMorning. Click above to read more.