Perforation, Ellipse

Perforation, Ellipse brings moving image and installation into a spatial study of rupture, circulation, and mediated memory. The work unfolds across projected imagery and physical structures. Sound of an arrow hitting its off-screen target punctuates the cuts of video footage in a series of sculptures. In conversation with the formal qualities of cinema, the exhibition explores the tensions within movement, time, and cultural memory. Nguyen orchestrates a dynamic architecture of screens, drifting between narrative passages in her film Aisle 9, sensorial abstractions, and archival online footage of Vietnamese bolero music. Across the installation, melodies of once forbidden bolero music, also known as nhạc vàng (“yellow music”), periodically surge across the multiple channels of video, aligning disparate images on the sculpture’s monitors, into a shared emotional frequency. Following the American War in Vietnam, the Vietnamese government banned bolero music for its sentimentality and romantic lyricism, however, the genre has recently reentered mainstream circulation. It endured underground in Vietnam because it was condemned, forced to exist quietly in households; and in the United States and abroad, disseminated through diasporic tapes, and transnational cabarets such as the television show Paris by Night. In the U.S. today, different but parallel constraints are performed, shaping what may be seen, shown, or archived. Nguyen stages censorship as a paradoxical system that can reproduce the very meanings it seeks to suppress, opposing a binary of freedom and repression. Cutting between partial stories and obscured gestures, Nguyen asserts that images withhold just as much as they disclose, reminding us that cultural memory is always negotiated under uneven conditions. Viewers must read between the lines to discern the encoded politics, and attune themselves to the residues that censorship inevitably leaves behind. -Jessica Kwok