Space now is not just where things happen: things make space happen. Space was clarified not only in the place where the picture hangs--the gallery, which, with postmodernism, joins the picture plane as a unit of discourse. The fragment from the real world plunked on the picture's surface is the imprimatur of an unstoppable generative energy. Do we not, through an odd reversal, as we stand in the gallery space, end up inside the picture, looking out at an opaque picture plane that protects us from a void?
Brian O'Doherty 1
The artworks of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba engage the experience of transience in daily life, an engagement entailing intervention, and redemption of the commonplace. The transient entails change, passage, a crossing of thresholds.
Reading this, one stands outside the precinct at the threshold of a gateway. This text, like the wall surrounding the precinct of the gallery, is a boundary, a liminal zone cutting outside from inside. It is by the cutting of the liminal that there is a place, a here that is not there, a this not a that. The placeness of a place is enacted by the particularities that are distinctive of its difference; placing is diffe'rance 2 enacting differences.
Places have a sense about them, a product both of the particular feeling of the place elicited in one by the formal structures of the topology of the place, and the associations those structures evoke in one from the memories brought to one's experience of the places one encounters. The felt character and hence of the numen underlying attribution of a genius loci 3 to sites is a regard both of alterity and presence evoked in apparent absence. This sensed presence of alterity grounds the sense of sanctity 4 ascribed to certain sites.
Work engaging the specificity of a site references this felt character, responding to the structure of the form of the site. This obtains in the placing of classical Greek temple architecture within the landscape, 5 the localization of the holy at the grave sites of saints in Latin antiquity, 6 and contemporary site-specific sculpture. Entering the gallery space transformed by the installation, one is inside the virtual space of the artwork, separated by the white walls of the gallery from the quotidian world.
The five Cibachrome photographs in the exhibition reference Nguyen-Hatsushiba's site-specific installations at other sites, at earlier, anterior times now absent to the viewer's presence. This placing in virtual presence of the spatially and temporally absent through the agency of the photograph exploits the inherent semiotics of the photograph qua medium as a shifter, a sign having its signification only by virtue of its emptiness. 7 As Roland Barthes notes:
The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have now is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. 8
On this view, the photograph shifts the gaze and consciousness to a spatial alterity perceived as a spatial presence, while rendering the now of perception correlative with the now-pastness of the temporal interval of exposure of the photograph, during which the photographer--the viewer's surrogate--was co-present with the object photographed. Insofar as the photograph qua medium is transparent to the viewer, it is seen-through, eliciting perception of the photographed in the mode of as-if: the there-then as if the here-now of a there-then. Yet the medium is a mediation, for all its seeming transparency to the innocent eye, the aesthetic correlate of the natural attitude prior to epoche. 9 The tension between the seeming transparency of the medium and the mediation which inheres in the medium has its site, which is not simply reposited in the image, but in the between 10 of image and viewer of the image. This is to presuppose a viewer not as a disembodied eye, but as embodied in responsive co-presence with the artwork. 11
To thus engage viewer response, incorporating the reflexive presence of the viewer's body within the physical space of the installation as if co-present with an absent alterity is the substance of Michael Fried's notion of "theatricality:" 12 a concern with the actual situation in which the embodied beholder encounters the artwork. While Fried opposes this sense of theatricality as antithetical to art, the development of response theory from the work of Hans Robert Jauss 13 and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty 14 and Mikel Dufrenne 15 urges its centrality to art.
Located to the left and front of the viewer entering the gallery, these photographs referencing other site-specific installations serve as an introduction to the work installed here, itself initially invisible as one approaches the gallery entrance. As prolegomena, these evocations of earlier works, themselves adumbrated by the reproductions of the exhibition catalog texts and images located outside the precinct of the gallery space and preceding this text, serve to contextualize the present works.
In the installation Rice Tree, rice covers the seed pods hanging from a tree, a doubling of the seed as potential life. To cover the seed pods of a tree located in the wasteland beneath a freeway with rice is to make the tree an object of regard by intervening in the condition of the dis-regard of the tree. This intervention is a redemption of the disregarded.
The use of rice and other foods recurs as a trope in Nguyen-Hatsushiba's recent work, distinguishing it from his earlier works of oil on canvas paintings. As a turning both inward to reference personal history and outward to engage the universality of the experience of eating, this move between media entails a connecting of the self and the social, of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Nguyen-Hatsushiba has said of rice:
To me, each grain represents life at the microcosm level. Uncooked, it can be sprinkled or spread like sand. When cooked, the kind of rice I use becomes sticky. I then shape the lump into a form. Occasionally, I include dried vegetable or fruit skin within the form. They are leftovers, the unwanted portions of the whole. I am interested in this process of the unconscious effort. Eating is as fundamental and essential to life as breathing. There is beauty in this process. 16
Rice Mower, Rice on Wooden Cot, Rice on Chair, and Rice on Blue Car reference installations in which rice covers discarded artifacts, at once both opening and collapsing the temporality, the duration, of the original use of these artifacts, their discarding, and their reuse in these installations as armatures for the rice.
Only as one advances into the gallery space and turns to the right from the color images on the walls to one's left and on the wall opposite the gallery door does one see the full installation of black charcoal briquettes comprising Shore--Arriving, Departing in stark contrast to the white gallery wall. Indeed, the configuration of the installation piece within the gallery space requires the viewer to advance into the gallery space and make a substantial turn to the right to confront the installation. The physical turning of the viewer to con-front the installation of Shore--Arriving, Departing is a trope of the transition from the character of the previous site-specific installation pieces referenced in the five Cibachrome photographs: more than simply being located in a spatial and temporal alterity, all are works situated in the exteriority of the landscape, as distinguished from the location of Shore--Arriving, Departing in the interiority of the psyche.
A shore is the boundary between land and water, a liminal zone. As such it is a zone of transition, of change and of transformation, a site of arrival and departure. Shore--Arriving, Departing engages both the experience of the Vietnamese boat people as both immigrants and emigres. The intrinsic duality of this experience extends to the dualisms of interior and exterior, presence and absence, self and other, reception and loss. For Nguyen-Hatsushiba, whose father is Vietnamese and whose mother is Japanese:
Working with social debris [in the site-specific works Rice Mower, Rice on Wooden Cot, Rice on Chair, and Rice on Blue Car] opened my eyes to a metaphor of the unwanted and the legacy of war refugees. . . . Being half Vietnamese, the association became more personal as I examined the history of the Vietnamese boat people: their struggle and the search for freedom, their hope to mingle, to adapt, to become one with the new society, often leading to the weary disposition of being unwanted. Although the number of Vietnamese boat people has lowered considerably, there are still refugee camps. The list of boat people does not stop only with the Vietnamese, nor [does] the term refugee applies [sic] only to them. Exodus to freedom and [a] humane living condition, unfortunately continues to exist throughout the world. 17
The array of matte black charcoal briquettes across two walls and down onto the floor overlays a pencil grid on the wall and the floor grid, obscuring the grid structure from which it departs, and flattening the corner of the gallery across which the piece is installed. The addition of rice grains amid the briquettes on the floor suggests the froth of surf breaking along a shore, emphasizing the liminality of the edge of the work as it terminates on the floor plane. Rice and charcoal form a pairing of materials: as rice is food and thus an energy source for the body, charcoal is fuel, and an energy source for cooking and heating. Each unit of rice grain or charcoal briquette can function as a module within a larger ensemble. Together, charcoal and rice enact a dualism of black and white, a trope for other dualisms, doubling the figure--ground relation of object and gallery wall.
The concern with the refugee, the outcast, extends beyond those who, like the boat people moving between cultures with whom Shore--Arriving, Departing is concerned to those who are regarded as outside the society of which they are a part. Asylum--Once Was Red, installed in the Sculpture Garden at the south facade of the Studio Gallery consists of plastic spheres filled dried tomato pieces. Both the time spent in collecting the discarded tomato pieces and their character as fragmentary and discarded portions of food are important for Nguyen-Hatsushiba:
I am also interested in the temporal and the transient. My indoor installations portray passages of time. The gradual process of accumulating dried and discarded materials is an important step in my piece. The time involved in installing a piece presents another dimension. Time becomes a recorder of an event or a performance. 18
Placed singly or small clusters, the tomato-filled plastic spheres suggest blood cells, synecdoche for persons alone and in groups. Like the interior installation work Untitled in Nguyen-Hatsushiba's in 1995 at ArtPace in San Antonio, Asylum--Once Was Red is concerned with the relation of individuals with AIDS to their society. During his artist-residency in Vietnam, Nguyen-Hatsushiba was impressed by the numerous street signs devoted to AIDS prevention, installed by the Vietnamese government. 19 Installed here outside the gallery, the separateness of the spheres filled with dried tomato fragments doubles the separation of persons with AIDS from society, the social construction of an alterity, an alien-ating.
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's artworks are evidence that the personal and the societal are not mutually exclusive, and that the gallery space, situated within but apart from the whole of which it is a part mirroring the whole, remains a site for addressing the concerns common to both the self and the society.