Born in Tokyo in 1968 to a Vietnamese father and a Japanese mother, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba spent his early childhood in Vietnam before returning to Japan. In 1978, he emigrated with his father to Texas where he attended school, going on to study art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art. While undertaking his Master of Fine Arts, he returned to Japan for the first time in 1993, visiting family and travelling to Kyoto, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to curator Yukie Kamiya, this trip had a profound influence on the artist’s work, ‘raising his awareness of his varied background, and how he . . . could be a connecting point between different cultures and histories from his position in-between’.¹ He consequently abandoned painting to create installations incorporating materials referencing Asian culture, such as rice, bamboo and noodles, and in 1997 he relocated to Ho Chi Minh City, where he still lives.

Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s work has been largely framed by his Vietnamese heritage, yet he has retained close connections with Japan. Though not an active participant in Japanese art scenes, he has regularly exhibited there and, like many artists of his generation, approaches his subjects through the lens of globalisation, using his ‘in-between’ position to explore power relationships, culture and identity. Addressing experiences of war and migration, particularly in relation to Vietnam, his works also often link to parallel situations around the world. His renowned ‘Memorial Projects’ — video works featuring underwater performances drawing on narratives of war and environmental damage — examine connections between historical events in Vietnam and other parts of Asia, including Japan.

Memorial Project Minamata: Neither Either nor Neither – A Love Story 2002–03 and Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle of Easel Point – Memorial Project Okinawa 2003 both feature divers performing arduous underwater feats, their submersion providing a lyrical, otherworldly dimension to the works, as well as suggesting both restricted movement and the freedom to float unfettered. The former work explores the chemical poisoning of Minamata Bay from industrial effluent in the 1950s, which had disastrous health implications for the local people; Nguyen-Hatsushiba links this to the use of Agent Orange in the American–Vietnam War.² The latter work records divers, filmed in the waters near the US army base in Okinawa, painting floating stars (recalling the flags of the United States and Vietnam), as well as canvases of movie ‘stars’ from American–Vietnam War films. Here, Nguyen-Hatsushiba connects the American bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972 with the US occupation (1945–72) and ongoing military presence in Okinawa.

The first work in the series, Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam, towards the complex – for the courageous, the curious, and the cowards 2001, depicts a group of cyclo (three-wheeled cycle–rickshaw) drivers pulling their vehicles through the water. To Nguyen-Hatsushiba, cyclos are emblems of everyday life that also symbolise experiences of modernisation, particularly following Vietnam’s adoption of the Doi Moi policy in 1986. ‘Doi Moi’ literally translates as ‘change and newness’ and is the Vietnamese Communist Party’s term for economic reform. The cyclo embodies Vietnam’s past and present as a form of transportation, as well as engaging ‘the experience of transience in daily life . . . The transient entails change, passage, a crossing of thresholds’.3 Pushed as burdens by the men — the wheels obstinately refuse to turn — the vehicles are a reflection of human struggle, not only in Vietnam, but in any society experiencing rapid transformation and/or political oppression. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba has said that, for him, the idea of a memorial ‘is not just trying to recall and acknowledge the past, but it is something that brings us to the present and also urges us to question the future’.4

Endnotes

1. Yukie Kamiya, ‘Body as a carrier of memory and message: Parallels to some Japanese post-war art’, in Susanne Neubauer (ed.), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba [exhibition catalogue], Kunstmuseum Luzern Museum of Art, Lucerne, and Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, 2007, p.41.
2. Fish and shellfish in Minamata Bay were contaminated with methylmercury, which when consumed led to severe neurological damage for thousands of people and hundreds of deaths. Millions of litres of Agent Orange were sprayed across southern Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 to destroy crops and cover for opposition forces, causing serious health conditions (leukaemia, cancer and physical deformities) for generations.
3. David Newman, ‘Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba: The place of meaning, the meaning of place’, Brookhaven College Center for the Arts Forum Gallery, http://home.earthlink.net/~davidrnewman/hatsushi.htm, viewed 19 April 2014.
4. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, quoted by Hou Hanru, ‘Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’, Tema Celeste, no.104, July–August 2004, pp.53–4.