Academic literature on the topic 'Installation art – Vietnam'

This article considers the singular installation work, Chocolate Room (1970), by the American conceptual artist Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), who is based in Los Angeles. Although Ruscha is best-known for his coolly composed paintings and photographs, Chocolate Room, explores the artist's use of unconventional materials to create works of art that confront viewers with the unexpected. The author discusses the creation of this site-specific work for the 35th Venice Biennale during tumultuous year of 1970 when many American artists boycotted the event due to the Vietnam War. Chocolate Room was installed in one part of the American Pavilion, where the interior walls of the room were covered with 360 screen prints made from Nestléé's chocolate. The author assesses the physical and psychological properties of chocolate and how Ruscha's installation manipulates these qualities as a deliberate act of provocation. Stains (1969), a seventy-five page, unbound book is also discussed in relation to Chocolate Room, highlighting Ruscha's interest in and experimentation with organic substances. The author situates these projects between the overlapping developments of Pop and Conceptual Art in America during the 1960s and 70s –– both of which are indebted to the 'anti-art' ideologies of Duchamp and the Dadaists. The author concludes with the unexpected demise of the installation and alludes to the ways in which the substance of a medium can transform the meaning of an image.

This essay makes the first sustained study of the Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu (1941–2015) who used American Pop Art vocabularies to describe the complex realities of US-occupied Okinawa. Focusing on his 1972 installation Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, the essay examines the critical ambivalence of Makishi's Political Pop as a translation strategy. Despite his critique of both American and Japanese imperialism, Makishi was aware that Okinawa was inseparably entangled in it, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which brought violence, but also economic benefits, to Okinawa. Despite his use of the American Pop idiom as a new lingua franca for contemporary art, Makishi's work did not reach either mainland or international audiences as the artist exhibited almost exclusively in Okinawa. By comparing Makishi's artistic strategies with those of a representative Okinawan novelist, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, especially as articulated in his 1967 novella The Cocktail Party, the essay situates the significance of Makishi's project within the emerging discourse on the global neo-avant-garde.

This conversation paper examines the visual, sonic and corporeal entanglements that inform the work of the Vietnamese-American-Japanese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. It explores the corporeal and aural qualities that are central to an understanding and sensorial experience of the artist's installations and visual practice. In paying attention to breath, sound and motion in visual art production, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's works reveal how corporeality and sonicity can dismantle the ocular-centrism of visual art. The discussions between Jun and Prarthana map the varied traumatic histories of racial colonialism, war and forced migration that haunt Vietnam's present, and bring to the surface the artist's aesthetic and political concerns around art, performance and cultural memory.

The article analyses the relatively meager response of artists to the ‘war on terror’ compared to the response of American artists to the war in Vietnam, where artists organized both exhibitions and protests against the war in South East Asia in the late 1960s. This of course has to do with the transformations going in contemporary art and the broader political context characterized by the hegemony of neo-liberalism. The article juxtaposes an installation by the Retort collective with an installation by Alfredo Jaar, analyzing two different ways of confronting the image war of the capitalist state machine with either a heave-handed use of art or a negative representation.

‘Out of the Mould: Contemporary Sculptural Ceramics in Vietnam’ is a study of the current practice of sculptural ceramics in Hà Nội, Vietnam and its historical antecedents within Vietnam and in the West. It examines the transition from a craft based practice to an art practice in some areas of ceramic practice in Hà Nội during the twentieth and early twenty first century. The theoretical basis for the thesis centres on Alőis Riegl's writings, especially Stilfragen (Problems of Style), 1893, in which he makes a close chronological examination of stylistic changes in various media, while intentionally disregarding any hierarchy within artistic disciplines. This is considered an appropriate model for the study of Vietnamese ceramics as the thesis proposes that, in recent years, ceramics has once more resumed its place as one of the major art forms in Vietnam. This status is in contrast to its relegation to a 'decorative', as opposed to a 'fine art', form in the discourse of the French colonial era. As background, the thesis examines the history of sculptural ceramics in Vietnam and discusses what is currently known of ceramic practice and the lineages of potters in particular villages famous for their ceramic works in the area around Hà Nội. The transition in ceramics practice is discussed in terms of the effect of changing conditions for the education of ceramicists, as well as the effect of other institutional structures, the economic changes as reflected in the art market and exhibitions structure and sociological changes. The role which ceramics has played in the emergence of installation art in Vietnam is also examined.

Doctor of Philosophy
‘Out of the Mould: Contemporary Sculptural Ceramics in Vietnam’ is a study of the current practice of sculptural ceramics in Hà Nội, Vietnam and its historical antecedents within Vietnam and in the West. It examines the transition from a craft based practice to an art practice in some areas of ceramic practice in Hà Nội during the twentieth and early twenty first century. The theoretical basis for the thesis centres on Alőis Riegl's writings, especially Stilfragen (Problems of Style), 1893, in which he makes a close chronological examination of stylistic changes in various media, while intentionally disregarding any hierarchy within artistic disciplines. This is considered an appropriate model for the study of Vietnamese ceramics as the thesis proposes that, in recent years, ceramics has once more resumed its place as one of the major art forms in Vietnam. This status is in contrast to its relegation to a 'decorative', as opposed to a 'fine art', form in the discourse of the French colonial era. As background, the thesis examines the history of sculptural ceramics in Vietnam and discusses what is currently known of ceramic practice and the lineages of potters in particular villages famous for their ceramic works in the area around Hà Nội. The transition in ceramics practice is discussed in terms of the effect of changing conditions for the education of ceramicists, as well as the effect of other institutional structures, the economic changes as reflected in the art market and exhibitions structure and sociological changes. The role which ceramics has played in the emergence of installation art in Vietnam is also examined.

This paper addresses some crucial categories in contemporary practices of memorialisation and public sculpture, including the polarities of “abstraction / figuration” and “transitivity / intransitivity” and the questions of anthropomorphism and embodiment. Referring to paradigmatic cases belonging to different media—sculpture, architecture, video installations—and comparing different memorialistic subjects (the Holocaust memorials, the Italian fascist sacraria, the monuments dedicated to the Vietnam war), the chapter investigates the dialectics of presence and absence in the relationship between the present material body of the monument and the absent bodies evoked by the process of memorialisation.

This paper investigates numerically the dynamic response of a fixed offshore platform, namely WHP, in a 2D irregular seaway using both deterministic and spectral design wave approaches. The long-crested irregular seaway is defined by Pierson Moskowitz (PM) spectrum with parameters suiting the WHP installation site. The platform dry weight is 10200 tonnes, sitting on 4 legs wellhead structure, and already installed in Hong Long field of Vietnam coast of South China Sea in a location of 45.47 meters water depth. The platform is supported on piles driven through its legs up to 100 meters protrusion into the seabed. The major construction components of WHP platform are prefabricated piles, jacket, deck, topside, helideck, boat-landing, and a number of J-tubes and risers. A 3D finite element model (FEM) of the platform is created to perform a comparative static and dynamic structural analysis of its response. The numerical results obtained from the deterministic and spectral design wave approaches are compared against each other, and partially validated against the actual platform measurements to introduce a reliable and meaningful interpretation of the numerical results. Finally, for the whole effort to be demonstrated efficiently a few conclusions are introduced and some future recommendations are proposed.

Throughout the Asia Pacific region, fish farming is a vital and growing source of food security and economic activity. Since 1970, aquaculture has maintained an average annual growth rate of 8.7% in the region. Currently, almost 90% of global aquaculture production currently takes place in Asia Pacific and over 20 million people are employed in the sector. This growth has been associated with a large increase in family-run backyard aquaculture and integrated agriculture-aquaculture reservoirs in areas like rural Vietnam. However, yields in those rural ponds have typically been low. This is largely due to lack of aeration systems, which introduce oxygen into the pond water and allow for greater stocking densities, healthier fish, and greater yields. Aeration systems typically are not employed in these remote communities due to high capital costs, lack of access to reliable electricity, and prohibitive maintenance costs. To address this need, a low-cost solar-thermal aeration system for implementation in resource-constrained settings was devised. The system consists of a metallic solar collector and a heat transfer column, which induces convective circulation in the water by dissipating heat to the cooler, deeper layers of the pond. As a result of the circulation produced by the device, oxygen generated by phytoplankton at the top of the pond is distributed throughout the water column, preventing oxygen losses to the atmosphere due to surface supersaturation and increasing the overall pond oxygen content. This paper presents the system models developed to validate the concept, including a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model and a diel Dissolved Oxygen (DO) simulation model. These models, when used in conjunction, can estimate the increase in DO to be expected by the introduction of passive aeration device. These models were tailored to represent two target test ponds in Bac Ninh, Vietnam. To calibrate the models, instrumentation measured relevant parameters including DO and water temperatures at various depths, wind speed, ambient air temperature, and solar irradiance. A description of the mechanical design, construction and installation of two full-scale prototypes is then discussed, and field results for the first month post-implementation are analyzed. The model and experimental results indicate that the device can improve the DO content at deep levels of the ponds (i.e. oxygen-depleted regions) and has the potential to improve aquaculture productivity in resource-constrained settings.