AMONG THE featured international artists at this year’s Tulca is Jun Nguyen -Hatsushiba, who was born in Tokyo, raised in the US, and now lives in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City.
The image adorning the cover of the Tulca programme is taken from Hatsushiba’s short film, Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Toward the Complex-For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards, which is being screened daily, on a continuous loop, at No 1 Merchants Road.
The film piece represents two of the most disenfranchised groups in Vietnam - rickshaw drivers and fishermen - who find themselves increasingly marginalised and their livelihoods under threat in a rapidly changing society.
The film portrays a group of men attempting to propel a number of rickshaws across a rocky seabed. A strangely poetic submarine drama ensues. The rickshaw-drivers’ movements seem slow, ‘floaty’, dreamlike as they progress through their underwater world yet there is also a palpable sense of struggle and strain as they strive to haul their cyclos across the ocean floor or break off from their pedalling and pushing to kick upwards to the surface for air.
Adding to the visual appeal of the film is the way in which the greeny-blue underwater light of the sea is pierced from overhead by thin bright rods of sunlight.
Interestingly, Hatsushiba employed fishermen to act as his cyclo-drivers in the film as they had the necessary diving skills so that his film literally as well as metaphorically brings together the worlds of fisherman and rickshaw-driver.
Hatsushiba also had Vietnam's boat people in mind as he was making his film; as he told one interviewer: “I was relating cyclo drivers’ life to boat people’s lives, because I found they are counterparts: one who had to leave and start new life and one who had to remain and live with an existing life. And also, the ones who made it and the ones who did not.
“So the memorial project was about offering a prayer to people who lost their lives during this transition. So I wanted the cyclo drivers going into the water to be physically offering themselves. Of course they don’t end up dying, but their demonstration of struggle becomes the offering. It’s not just praying and thinking about it but physically doing the thing. So that’s why it’s considered a memorial.”
The exhibitions and film at No 1 Merchants Road continue until November 23.
