My recent photo installation at the Singapore Art Museum, as a part of the TransportAsian exhibition.
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Richard Streitmatter-Tran
The Jungle Book - The Terrain of the Real Fake
Photo installation, 2009

The pair of photographs contribute to an ongoing series of works called The Jungle Books. A long-term project, borrowing its name from Rudyard Kipling's famous collection of stories, is basically a conceptual framework for art works that speak to life in the Mekong sub-region. Each work will draw inspiration and information from diverse sources and issues such as early colonial travelogues and fiction, early anthropology, the natural sciences, popular culture and tabloid trash, current news, local beliefs and mythologies and politics.

In this series, we find the endangered Giant Mekong Catfish washed ashore and expired as the people come to term with the unexpected arrival of a big problem. In the other photograph, Vietnam's first ever satellite has returned home, smoldering as people gaze upon the symbol of national ambition from the safety of their homes.

While the series speaks to the fluidity between fact and fiction, the photographs are fictions themselves, composited using 3D models. No attempt is made to be convincing. The artifice is to be celebrated.
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Also, Gilles Massot (LaSalle College of the Arts) and I delivered a short artist presentation titled "Constructed Images: Simulacra in Southeast Asia) on May 29th. He brought up an interesting point that if the ecological conservation of the Mekong is not taken seriously, the Giant Mekong Catfish, like the Tasmanian tiger, will soon be as much a fiction as the photograph, and people will be flocking to Mekong theme parks to take photos and buy stuffed animals of the catfish, then existing solely as a simulacrum.

I will be exhibiting work in the next days in the TransportAsian exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum and the Ifa Gallery in Shanghai, both opening on May 30th.

Artists: Nguyen Minh Phuoc, Nguyen Quang Huy, Nguyen Anh Tuan, Le Huy Hoang, Pham Ngoc Duong, Hoang Duong Cam, R. Streitmatter-Tran. Curated by Marie Terrieux

Title: A Snapshot of Contemporary Vietnamese Art
Venue: Ifa Gallery, Shanghai
Dates: 30 May - 20 July, 2009
Vernissage: 30 May 3-8pm
Info: www.ifa-gallery.com
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Artists: Shannon Castelman, Chun Kai Qun, Chua Chye Tec, John Clang, Xavi Comas, Mark R. Kauffmann, Dominic Khoo, Ko Aung, Tung Mai, Nge Lay, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Samantha Tio, Francis Ng, Gilles Massot and students from Lasalle Faculty of Fine Arts. Curated by Patricia Levasseur.

Title: TransportAsian
Venue: Singapore Art Museum
Dates: 30 May - 11 August, 2009
Vernissage: 30 May 6pm
Info: www.singart.com

TransportAsian is a photography exhibition featuring works of artists from Southeast Asia.

The fusion of themes Transport and Asia presents a delightful array of works documenting the history of transportation. It also showcases each photographer's interpretation and metaphorical explorations of the theme. It is divided into four focuses in photography: Time, Space, Action and Fiction.

Vistors will be invited to experience a new perspective of photography that uses various surfaces, materials and even techniques. TransportAsian boasts works in media including prints, installations and multimedia.

TIME LIGAMENTS - Contemporary Vietnamese Artists
Exhibition dates: 14 May-16 August, 2009
Venue: 10 Chancery Lane Gallery ART PROJECTS and ANNEX
Chai Wan Industrial City Phase One, 6/F, 60 Wing Tai Road, Chai Wan, Hong Kong

Participating Artists:
Khanh Cong Bui, Tiffany Chung, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Christine Nguyen, Thi Trinh Nguyen,
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Tuan Thai Nguyen, Tu Duc Nguyen, Rich Streitmatter-Tran

Co-curated by Dinh Q. Lê and Zoe Butt in cooperation with San Art, Ho Chi Minh City

Circulating within our image-burdened world are creative wanderers that ponder the vestiges of mediated fact and control -- the crumbling layers of paint on government walls; the memory of a burning, martyred monk; the quasi-morphing of local habit with the experiential remnants of a 'European Elsewhere' -- these itinerant image makers of Vietnam contort such hidden shifts into concrete form in Time Ligaments.

In this exhibition nine perspectives grapple with the persisting memories of a country where the past stubbornly lingers in the literal and mental landscape of the everyday. Their stories traverse the experience of migration and return; the metamorphosis of popular foreign trend with local custom; the stymied struggle of resistance against historical ideas of social control; or the increasing urban dilettante whose material desires lay waste to their history and surroundings. Time is schizophrenically warped in the photographically paused moments of Tu Duc Nguyen, while Phu Nam Thuc Ha's lens captures the surfaces of crumbling government walls marveling at how time is the nascent agent of change. In Tuan Thai Nguyen's careful paintings, where working life holds hostage to ideas of individual social worth, a crouching headless figure dressed in office garb faces a corner of an empty room. Such psychological influence of a neo-liberal world is also of great import in the gouache rendered drawings of Khanh Cong Bui and the conceptual sculptures of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, where ideas of deterioration and control are given broader metaphorical context in examining how the tools of a game operate as political strategy in pacifying conflict and terror, not just in Vietnam.

This is but a brief glance of the layered complex narratives in this exhibition where nine provocative artists will be showcased through painting, video, photography, sculptural installation and works on paper.

Title: Lao Tzu Dreams of the LHC (2009)

Sculpture. Stainless steel, copper, brass

The installation began with an observation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most expensive scientific endeavor to date. The LHC is a particle accelerator whose mission is to replicate the conditions of the universe during the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, and to validate our current models explaining the nature of reality. Particular components of the LHC appear strangely similar in form to the Ba Qua mirrors used in Feng Shui geomancy found throughout Asia that aim to properly align natural forces. Both the LHC and the Ba Qua mirrors aim to harness and understand the power of nature and yet are tools separated by thousands of years.

Some of most recent observations of the quantum world are also very close to descriptions found in the ancient texts, such as the I Ching (Book of Changes) and the Tao Te Ching, such as the fundamental nature of all things being movement and change. The number 8 has for long been considered lucky and primary to the Chinese as the trigrams represents all possible human and cosmic interactions. Eight has also become fundamental to our modern conditions, as the number has become the cornerstone of the binary code of our digital world (for example, 8, 32, 64-bit), and it has extended beyond into other areas of thought such as the 8-fold path in Buddhism.

This installation reconsiders the unique relationship between ancient texts and the most advanced cutting-edge frontiers of science and wonders if both are the same, as if Lao Tzu had once dreamed of such an experiment.

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory... [we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. - Neils Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.

Similarities in visual form: The LHC and the Ba Qua

Work in progress

Work in progress. Completion of the polygonal faces

Opening night at the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Annex

A view through the sculpture

Over the last months, Chaw Ei and I were able to meet students and share our work in several cities including Boston, New York, Chicago, Providence, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore. It has also been a good opportunity to catch up with old friends and to meet new ones and foremost to remind ourselves of the pleasure of learning. We even attended an evening mold making workshop in New York and in the span of an hour learned more than days scouring books. Below are some images of some of the locations and people we've engaged.

School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC)

Chaw Ei speaks about her work and performance art in Burma

Professor Nora Taylor of SAIC and Chaw Ei moments before her presentation

Northern Illinois University, DeKalb

Art Students from NIU DeKalb

Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston

North Hall at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Sharing work with the Studio for Interrelated Media at MassArt

New York City

Chaw Ei delivers an art presentation at the Open Society Institute in New York.

Providence, Rhode Island

Chaw Ei speaks at the International Writers Project at Brown University

Tokyo, Japan

L-R: Mitsunori Sakano (Command-N), me, Naoko Horiuchi (Arts Initiative Tokyo)

Presentation at Kandada, as a part of the Regional Code Asia program and my exhibition.

Hong Kong

I had the pleasure in April to work with a unique group of students with the Para/site curatorial program. Students enrolled in the Para/Site curators program presented and defended the concepts for their exhibitions-in-progress. A select team of international curators based in Asia shared their experience, critique and insight through a special platform utilizing Facebook.

The curatorial student team (Nana Seo, Kathy Lam Hoi Sin, Iris Lo and Evangelo Costadimas) will present their final exhibition, Feigned Innocence, at the Osage Gallery Kwun Tong in Hong Kong on May 29, 2009.

International Curators' Talk Series: Public Lecture
"Curatorial engagements in the Mekong Subregion of the Southeast Asia"