Yo Yo Ma and Lil Buck

Yo Yo Ma meets Lil Buck. You know Yo Yo Ma, he's the most famous cellist in the world. But you don't know Lil Buck - and that's what makes all of this work as well as it does. A fan of both on YouTube saw them independently and suggested a collaboration - certainly an element of audience participation gone viral. And this is now our media environment. Does life imitate art, or the other way around? There are now more ways than ever to explore that juxtaposition. What if more companies started to explore combining seemingly disparate elements? Could brands be reinvented, extended, reborn? Yes.

aSaigon/CreativeMorning welcomes The Propeller Group - 15 April, 8:30am

The Propeller Group is an art collaborative that specializes in media production, using popular culture, cinema, television, advertising, the web, galleries, museums, writings, interviews and conversation to distribute and disseminate art projects. The Propeller Group’s projects have been about collapsing media strategies of power, distribution, and access to information as well as issues of public vs. private space within the development of sub-cultures and popular cultures.

"In many of our projects, we try to create disorder, hoping that disorder in such particular instances can become another "sense of order" to an audience that may be all too afraid of change, or unaccepting of other possible ways of engaging with their current cultural/social structures. We like to play. We align ourselves with different cultural producers. We like to let ourselves get ingested into the bellies of big social beasts such as television or the various manifestations of pop-culture. We feel that true criticality comes from the change that can happen from the inside of a system, and not from analytical discourse posited from external positions."

The Propeller Group is comprised of Phunam Thuc Ha, Matt Lucero, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen.

Based in Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City, The Propeller Group doesn't want you to view art in the way that one might have been taught to view art. And The Propeller Group doesn't want you to see television or any other medium for that matter for what you might believe it to be - rather they seek to be deconstructivist in any variety of media and have you put things back together in any way that you like. With the blurring of lines between television, telephones, computers and the next big mobile bling to hit the market, it only makes sense to begin to re-examine our relationship with media and recreate it for a new means of consumption. Come join us on April 15th as we explore disparate and ever changing creative horizons with The Propeller Group.

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

ART REVIEW

Vietnamese Voices Against a Whir of War

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 12, 2010

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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.

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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. 

 Read more here:

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All about Adrian Jones and the 'restricted reading room' at the HCMC library

Sandrine Llouquet and Adrian Jones by Mads Monsen

This is the best photo of Sandrine that I have ever seen. It's all there. The beauty, the intellect, the daughter, the years, the partner, the desire to learn, the diaspora. Let us capture this forever. Because that's what aSaigonCreativeMorning is all about. It's about the ideas, and absorprtion and regurgitation and disparate cultures  and whatever happens after that. Too many coffees and I thought about this. Bad idea, all that coffee. But a better idea is what we all need. Dearly. That's it.

'You had to be there', as they say. And that's the idea. Did anybody know that an entire record of the North/South Vietnamese story, visual and written,  is kept, and not burned, at the Ho Chi Minh City Library? And only accessible to those with a permit. Adrian told stories of what it took to get that permit and what he found while there.

Adrian Jones, with a great love of story telling, is in the business of allowing the Vietnamese people to paint the world in a 20th century  context, having assembled the Witness Collection - the largest private collection of Vietnamese art in the world, because the Vietnamese and maybe only the Vietnamese, are uniquely qualified and skilled enough to do that. Eurpean colonialism, American Imperialism. Internal strife. Independence, Largely self-taught. This is our world history, not revisionist or propagandised. Balanced things.

Thank you Adrian. You had to be there and we thank you. And for those who weren't, you lost something.

Next month, a bit of great history and art, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And the Vietnamese artist who made it happen. Let's join together. But, you have to be there.

Thank you too Sandrine.

Full photos of the event are available on our Facebook group page.

aSaigon/CreativeMorning welcomes Witness Collection curator Adrian Jones - Friday, 18 Feb, 8:30am

'Goi Dao' - 1943 -
Tran Van Can (1910 -1994)

Adrian Jones, 44, is the founder of the Witness Collection, Director of Asiarta Foundation, and Advisor for the Vietnam collection to The National Art Gallery, Singapore. With more than 1000 pieces to date, Jones’ purpose in building the Witness Collection has been to “tell a story, the story of Vietnam’s people and society during the past century. Due to Vietnam being a microcosm for the world’s major social and political changes during that time, I [Jones] believe Vietnamese art tells the story of ‘our century’ in a way that art from no other country can."


Beyond works of art, Jones’ team has also traveled around Vietnam collecting old tubes of oil paint, unused canvases and old paper—in fact, pretty much any art material they can find that has been produced since the 1940s. They have also been interviewing elderly artists to gain a better understanding of their techniques. Jones also finds himself in a unique position helping define the value and merit of art in a nation with few domestic collectors of contemporary art.

“I’ve come to realise that, often unwittingly, we regularly take on a set of social responsibilities when collecting unique and original art – sometimes including responsibilities to a much larger community. Most artists create their works to be seen, so firstly we have at least some duty to the artist to share their works with other viewers, whether friends and family or wider afield.”, says Jones.


We're pleased to welcome Adrian and hope the morning will provide both visual and intellectual stimulation. The Witness Collection can be found here.


Register for the event here:

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Sponsors: Coffee - Malongo, Breakfast - Tin Foil Grill. Space - TBWA

Dustin Nguyen Unplugged?

What if we don't show video of his past work? What if you don't see his 21 Jump Street co-star Johnny Depp on film? What if we don't even have a microphone? Will you care? I hope not. Saigon/CreativeMornings is not about PowerPoint shows or corporate meeting stuff. We hope it's about real. Dustin will discuss the balance between art and commerce. For all those who signed up and will join us on Friday morning, thank you. Let's talk. Let's chat. Let's learn. Let's have fun. Good CreativeMornings to you. You made it happen. (Sandrine covers things here in French.)