MyLoan Dinh

Material memory

1. You describe your connection to Vietnamese lacquer as latent exposure. Can a material remember a cultural inheritance before the artist consciously names it?

That’s a tough question. I think to, I guess for, to visualize what this piece is, imagine basically it’s a pair of boxing gloves that are completely covered in little fragments of eggshells. They’re hanging on the wall from a hook on the, it’s almost like a mosaic skin that’s covering these gloves. And in the particular design of a butterfly, one big one butterfly, half the butterfly on one pair of gloves and the other half on the other, and then it cast a shadow of wings on the wall. So just to visualize that.

And so the, the question. Sơn mài is a particular technique, craft that is from Vietnam. It’s basically layered painting. It’s a lacquerware with resin, tree resin, that is inlaid with eggshells or seashells to create some sort of motif or design, etcetera, etcetera.

I was very familiar with this technique as I was growing up because my parents had little pieces of lacquerware around their house. They’re usually done on like pieces of wood panels or objects like vases and things like that. So it’s hard to, for me it’s like I’ve always remembered, I have always known these pieces, this type of work, right, and this material, seeing it. And it’s, you know, I always knew like, oh, that’s Vietnamese.

And so, but it took me a very long time as an adult, as an artist, to actually experiment with it. And so I think it was always with me, but to experiment with the material itself didn’t come until I thought about what, how, what would it be that I would try to experiment this on. And actually, you know, there are objects that have nothing to do traditionally with the sơn mài itself, objects like boxing gloves or life jackets or things like that.

Fragility and force

2. Why repeatedly place eggshell veneer on forceful objects such as hammers and boxing gloves? Are you softening violence, making fragility defensive, or refusing the distinction between the two?

My, my approach is what, like, I guess what happens when you take an object that has meaning, right, that symbolizes something that is forceful, right, like boxing gloves or a sword or hammers, right? They have a specific purpose. And what happens when you cover it with something as fragile as eggshells? What happens to the meaning of that object?

And I’m more interested in the tension that it creates because life is full of tension, right? Life has tensions of softness, of hardness, of and all the kind of things in between, right? That space that’s in between that we don’t know how to describe it, right? Life is not soft and life is not really all hard in my life, right? And so my exploration is what is that? What is that in the in-between space once you put, when you put those type of things together? And that’s my exploration.

But also, like, you know, actually like eggs, like that’s a, I love working with that material because it is such a, it’s like open source. It’s an easy source material. Anywhere pretty much in the world I can find eggs as my source, right? It is something that symbolizes life in many ways. You can eat it, you can feed yourself with the inside and use the outside as a material. I mean, like, that’s, I think that’s really cool. And yeah, like feed my family, you know, myself, like nourish and then create something with it also.

And, but yes, I mean, I do choose oftentimes objects that are violent because part of it is because these objects are, people associate like masculinity with them, you know? And so I like to play with the idea of like if I take these like very masculine violent objects and I put something very, what’s considered very feminine, like an egg, soft, on top, what happens to it?

And yeah, maybe, so maybe it’s softening the violence or actually getting people to question like what is it? What is it I’m seeing? You know, it’s a little bit also confusing the audience, you know, the viewer.

Boxing gloves also, but they, you know, you are using it to punch, you know, to fight, but you’re protecting yourself. It’s a soft object. And when you really think about it, you protect the person that you’re fighting because if you use just raw fist, you’re really going to hurt somebody, right? And so there’s all of those things that are to consider when I’m using my boxing gloves as the object.

Code-shifting

3. Boom Boom Butterfly moves among Vietnamese language, American boxing history, war cinema, racialised sexuality and family memory. How do you know when code-shifting opens meaning and when it risks becoming illegible?

Yeah, this piece is, I mean, it’s loaded with a bunch of, like, there’s a lot that you can take away.

So like I said, the word bướm, bướm is butterfly in Vietnamese. Also like boom, you know, that’s like a word, like oftentimes when you see like the kind of cartoon graphics, you know, to like visualize like something, like forceful hit, you would like write out like boom, right? That sound, boom. I mean, there’s lots of layers to that word.

But also in a lot of war, Vietnam, the American War in Vietnam movies, films that are directed by Westerners, usually Americans, on these war movies, oftentimes it will have like, you know, the oversexualization of Vietnamese women. And, you know, there are phrases like boom boom, which mean like having sex, you know, offering sex to the GIs, American GIs.

And then there’s the other part, which is, you know, the boxing of like with Muhammad Ali. And, you know, he, like personally, his political stands of like, I am not going to go to Vietnam and kill and fight other brown people, you know? And he like put on the line, this like champion, you know, who put all his titles on the line for this during the war in Vietnam.

And so all of these layers are part of this piece. And the kind of, I guess in my description, is kind of this code switching between the different ways of, I guess, the word boom is used.

But butterflies, like, it’s also a migratory insect, right? It migrates. And so again, it’s like a lot of my work, it’s reference to, you know, like the idea of migration and identity. And identity is not a fixed place either. It is an ongoing, ever-changing state that one is in.

Exhibition relation

4. Does showing this work among neighbours, collaborators and artists connected to NOVILLA reveal a different dimension than showing it inside a conventional museum or biennial context?

It’s been shown in museums and some galleries but mainly in museums in the US.

Yeah, I mean it’s constantly worrying. I mean the piece Boom Boom, when I started thinking about what piece would be appropriate for this exhibition, for this project, I thought about Boom Boom because of the different layers and the different meanings and the fragments of it.

And in many ways it’s appropriate that it’s coming home, right? The other home.

And part of it is the work does touch upon these conflicts that are constantly going on, but especially now it seems to be much more present.

And thinking about Muhammad Ali and how he put everything on the line to stand for what he believed in, I think more than ever we’re kind of asked, or I ask myself, what is it that I’m willing to sacrifice and give up and put on the line for what I believe in?