Cultural Portraits
Each face in this series is not only a person but a community's memory — of an art form, of a culture, of the place and the time that person belonged to. They were masters; they practised the art and carried it to the public; they were the thread between an audience and a world. When they go, that thread seems to break with them, and the way the art was heard, seen and felt through them is no longer what it was.
The series does not ask how to hold on to what has passed. It asks something else: when the line of direct transmission breaks, what is left of an art and its culture? And can something rebuilt afterwards, out of the fragments of memory, come to hold a value of its own?
Some forms are receding into the past — the cải lương stage among them, for all the work now being done to revive it and bring it back to an audience. In that, cải lương has much in common with Biên Hòa ceramics, the very tradition I use to build those faces. Subject and material here carry the same question, and I let them stand side by side on a single surface.
Bán Dùi is a southern Vietnamese nói lái — a syllable-swapping wordplay — on the poet's name, Bùi Giáng. Bùi Giáng used the form constantly in his own writing.
After a photograph by Dương Minh Long, used with the photographer's permission.
The artist formulates the glazes. Potters at kilns in Biên Hòa prepare the clay and roll it into thin, hand-sized slabs; once dry, the slabs are brushed with the artist's glazes by hired artisans and fired, following the techniques of the local kiln tradition. The artist then breaks the fired tiles, or cuts them with nippers, into smaller pieces and sets them into the work, among a small number of older collected fragments, which grow scarcer each year.