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| 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.
A few years ago Vietnam finally passed a law requiring motorbike riders to wear a helmet but this law only required them for adult riders. Kids don't need them. Is somebody kidding somebody? We could blame the lawmakers for not seeing the fatalities and injuries amongst children but that shouldn't release parents from their basic responsibilities to protect those children should it? I didn't think so. And so an idea was hatched (yeah, bad pun) to do a public service campaign to speak to parents about the importance of the whole family wearing a helmet. In a country of what might be easily, 30 million motorbikes for roughly 80 million people the motorbike is a way of life in Vietnam. In fact it's an extension of life, an extra limb it has been called. But it's also a way of death, the highest rate of highway fatalities in Asia before enactment of the law.
On launch day, the government deployed 5000 police around the city (Saigon) to enforce strict fines ($10 is strict here) and lo and behold - one day nobody had a helmet and the next day they did. Except for the children. And this baffled the crap out of me. Didn't the people understand that a not fully formed skull can be crushed up to 60% easier than an adult's? Didn't they see it as important? And the answer is, 'no they didn't'. What was important to them was not paying a fine to comply with the law. Sad, I thought. No thought about the reasons one should wear a helmet at all.
Ask anyone what they believe to be a symbol of birth and childhood and you will eventually hear the word 'egg'. So I took that visual and put a helmet on it. It was funny. And it worked. We all know eggs crack easily and putting a helmet on them just reinforced the point. Photographer Mads Monsen and I worked together to create this campaign and we did it without a specific client in mind - because we thought the idea was important. Should you know of any organization in Vietnam who might be interested in running this work as a public service, please contact me. We would love to get this campaign up and running and doing the job the parents should be doing - getting all their kids to wear a helmet.
