LONG LONG LEGACIES
The work ‘“Long Long Legacies” can be perceived as the metamorphosis of a land, a landscape, a portrait, or a community.
The curtain is made from industrial wood such as rubber, coffee, cashew, or forest tree wood...that are grown in the central highland of Vietnam. These trees, when their prices dropped due to rampant cultivation and the economic crisis, were chopped off. The wood then recycled into beads that are often used to make prayer beads in spiritual practice. In the artwork, these wooden beads are created as an endless chain with no beginning nor end, like a network that can be changed and in space and time. Here they become a medium, a means of transmission, reflecting long-term changes from the Central Highlands.
In the 19th century, the Central Highlands were often referred to as “Rung Moi” – (forest of indeginous people) in Vietnamese and Hinterland Moi in French, locating between Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Siam. From 1945 to 1979 the Central Highlands was a contested warzone with France, then the US and Democratic Cambodia (Khmer Rouge). In the 1960s, the policy of assimilation of culture of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), the government at that time brought people from the midlands to reclaim this land, transforming them into new economic zones in this highland, and especially during the Doi Moi-Renovation period after 1986, many lowland people - mainly Kinh people from the poor northern and central provinces - came to the Central Highlands to grow coffee, rubber, pepper... rapidly transforming this land into a hot spot in the chain of globalization links.
In the uncompromising transformation of the Central Highlands, what legacies that are left? disappearing forests, dislocated indigenous communities, farmers, trees, animals, rocks, mountains, rivers, worms, butterflies, honey bees or spirits ... all have to leave, separate, run away from their homeland.
The bead chain is an equation that attempt to reconnect the fragmentation of this land. The wooden beads are made from a variety of wood, such is a memory of a use-to-be natural biodiversity and ethnical diversity. They all now have the same size, shape, color, becoming uniform. However, seeing from another perspective, this uniformity is also a possibility of diversity in the era of globalization, if creatures and humans realise opportunities within the brutal sweep of modernization to reconciles with their originality, it will be an opportunity for sustainable development - at first glance, it may seem uniform but this uniformity carries the materilas or a possible diversity.
