How i miss the taste of tangerine

A short cut from video "How i miss the taste of tangerine", 2018

OPEN STUDIO AT ASIA PLEX, GWANGJU, KOREA (2018)

ACC Arts Space Network Residency Program’, which is planned and operated by Asia Culture Center(ACC), is Art Space-in-Residence(AIR.) program of Asian Arts Space Network Project.

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HOW I MISS THE TASTE OF TANGERINE

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Location: Asia Culture Center; ASIAPLEX STUDIO (located in 20 Gyeongyeol-ro17beon-gil, Seo-gu, Gwangju, Republic of Korea).

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The open studio event is laid out as the artist’s experiment in site-specific and video installation.

The movie rolls into a long day of a pregnant woman wandering around in the fictional year of 2080 when 77 percent of world population has been resided to planet Mars. Soft stillness scenes and the ruined Gwangju City is the background throughout the movie. Her wandering goes from the room onto the empty streets; a futuristic story put together by remnants of history in order to trace back the identity of the past.

The installation is to channel one into the artist’s surreal realm of her present artist residency where most passers-by on the streets, in the metro and on Mount Mudeungsan are faces of old people. It seems to mark her mind with wrinkles and renders an image of herself in a different body and a different scene. Coming from her uncertainty about human identity she speculates future and past - the “timezones” consisted of one’s own political and social opinions. The world she and her millennial generation living in is the world of modern technology and fragmented stories or images of the parallel post-war past.

Expecting to see a tangerine will be fruitless since in this 60-year time, there is neither any farmer nor land to grow a tangerine tree. Yet the only consolation lies at last in the fragrant and sweet piece of the fruit. The freedom people need to live in a world of fixed rules, the freedom no laws can govern, is the fleeting moment of freshness tasting the tangerine on Mount Mudeungsan. The artwork is the un-united as a unit, a sense of the non-sense.

Artist: Xuân Hạ

Curator: Đặng Thành Long

This open studio is a part of ACC Arts Space Network Residency Program, which is planned and operated by Asia Culture Center(ACC), is Art Space-in-Residence(AIR.) program of Asian Arts Space Network Project - Gwangju, Korea.

Sound music by Trang Ly

Locations: The Gwangju Military Hospital, Yang-nim dong Missionary Cemetery, Mudeungsan Mountain, Yangdong market, Gwangju River.

Site-specific installation // Video installation

ACC AASN Residency Open Studio, Gwangju, Korea, 2018

"The sound of fracture healing", 2018

Hanji paper, a dead twig - found object from The Gwangju Military Hospital.

A SOLO SHOW BY XUAN HA, ORGANIZED BY SAN ART, VIET NAM (2019)

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HOW I MISS THE TASTE OF TANGERINE

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Location: San Art, Sai gon, Vietnam

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“how i miss the taste of tangerine,” Xuân Hạ’s site-specific and video installation at Sàn Art, animates a nested situation emblematic of modern urbanscapes: a fictionalized city is screened within a white cube gallery inside a labyrinthine high-rise condominium surrounded by soaring financial towers. The breathless recursion of boxed spaces that motivates the installation carries the delirious rhythm of urban milieus. Viewers are primed to be alert to the no-frill design of the common containers that house human beings as well as artworks. By extension, the white cube, a now-global standard regime of art displays, is exposed and metamorphoses into a medium itself.

Besieged by the unbearable compartmentalization of being, Xuân Hạ’s moving-image work zooms in on the diseased, if not deceased, space of a claustrophobic apartment while simultaneously presenting the deserted landmarks of an imagined city. Set in the fictional year 2080 when most of the human race have relocated to Mars, the film forecasts an exhausted and evacuated land where the city apparatus withers among defunct monuments and desolate gravestones. In spite, or perhaps because, of the menace of potential decay, the title of the installation tenderly summons a scent of landscapes lost.

Text by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng (excerpts)
Read full curatorial text here: http://san-art.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/TangerinePDF_Web_EN.pdf

The window was in the process of forming.

Overview of the installation.

"Replicating and physicalizing the menace of urban decay, Xuân Hạ transforms Sàn Art’s white cube into a site of dusty fantasy. She covers the floor space and furniture with the same translucent plastic sheets that occasionally envelop the corpse-like protagonist in the film. Shattered bricks, concrete fragments and dangling electricity wires extracted from the gallery walls and ceilings are all re-used as part of the installation. The barren atmosphere, which dims as the sun goes down due to reduced track lighting, looks prepared for a possibility of even more collapse and debris." - exceprts from curatorial text of Nguyen Hoang Quyen.