Thanks to Beck Jee-Sook, Heejin Kim, Cho Ji Young and IAS for organizing this gathering on such short notice and also for such an amazing place to stay. We would also like to thank Min Yong Soon and Le Viet for inviting us to Seoul to experience a little of Korea, and to Ssamzie space for our workspace.

Through the work we do as a team, we have engaged with anthropology and post-colonial studies in our investigation of social hierarchies and power relations. Our projects assess history, art and media’s potential for truth-telling and manipulation.
Our work takes conventional viewership to task, by using strategies which are related to but do not assume traditional forms of documentary, agit-prop or community-based projects. Since we are both also educators, our work takes up a pedagogic challenge, asking viewers not to take information for granted, but to question the motives behind how representational choices are made. For us, ethics and aesthetics are always intertwined: political and ethical positions are conveyed, for instance, in how an image is framed, how space is used, and the effect of continuous or fractured time upon the viewer. Our creative decisions expose the structuring of information and the subjectivity embedded within each subject. As critical ethnographic practice, we do not seek to speak for our subjects, but speak near by, in the words of filmmaker and post-colonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha.

We have consistently examined issues of identity, focusing particular attention on those identities that are marginalized, misrecognized, underrepresented, exploited, and exiled. Our project Even The Trees Would Leave, produced in 2005, looks at the Vietnamese refugee crisis that took place in Hong Kong from 1975-2000. Through a narrative of photos and text, we trace a reverse chronology from the future to the day the first Danish container ship transporting Vietnamese refugees entered the waters around Hong Kong - a port of first asylum for those who fled.

This embattled history, still sensitive in Hong Kong, highlights pressing issues regarding the legalities of the seas, governmental responsibility, and the plight of global migrants. Today several former refugee camps have been converted into golf driving ranges and family recreation centers. Pillar Point, the last Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong, closed at midnight on May 31, 2000. River Trade Golf Driving Range and BBQ Centre now stands on its site. Whitehead Refugee Centre–once called the biggest prison in the world–is now home to Golf & Fun Driving Range. From our perspective, these sites of leisure and tourism are haunted by residual trauma.

Because of its dense population within a confined landmass, Hong Kong has historically re-claimed land from the sea. The closing of Hong Kong’s Vietnamese refugee camps were treated as another form of land reclamation-Hong Kong re-claiming its land for its own people. In 1997, when The People’s Republic of China recovered Hong Kong into its fold, the new government demanded the removal of all Vietnamese "migrants" from its soon-to-be “Special Administrative Region”. The re-classification of “refugees” to “migrants” is a troubling reminder that the humanitarian impulse is not free from the impact of global power relations and politics. Similarly in South Korea, as we gather from the essay about North Korean immigrants in the journal BOL, which we read here, N. Koreans who left the North have various names with their specific connotations as well: Talbookja, N. Korean defectors, Bookhan Nanmin, North Korean refugees, Bookhan Dongpo, brethren of North Korea, and Guisoon Youngsa, heroic escapees from N. Korea.

Even The Trees Would Leave was published in Cabinet magazine and exhibited as embossed photographs in Hong Kong in 2005. [LT read some excerpts from Cabinet]

In February 2005, we were invited to participate in an event organized by the Danish collective rum46. The series of talks, exhibitions, interventions, and a companion publication was called Solidarity UNLIMITED? Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. We produced an installation coupled with a performance called This is Not Me, which we re-configured for publication in the upcoming issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism.

The photographs you see here were found as refuse in the Taiwan Police Department. They are presented here as we found them, the left-over remains of portrait photos with their faces punched out. While the faces continue on with a new life as ID cards, birth certificates, and work permits, these neglected remains signify to us a collectivity of ‘non-identities’: the people amongst us who are caught between visibility and invisibility. At once sad and comic, the faceless testify to the violence that severs individuals into anonymous categories, such as “undocumented,” “alien,” “refugee.”

These photo ID remainders were collected in Taiwan - a nation that is not internationally recognized, a state that is de facto stateless. According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the term "stateless person" refers to one who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. [A refugee is someone escaping persecution - a subset of stateless or displaced persons.] The stateless person is both privileged and burdened with a politicized past and a specific cultural memory. In 1948, Hannah Arendt – the German Jewish philosopher who herself became a stateless refugee ¬– observed that the internment camp was the only “country” for the stateless. She noted that after World War 1 a phenomenon unique in history took place in which masses of people lost their inalienable rights by becoming stateless; these refugees found that there was no place on earth where they could legally establish a home.

In Rethinking Marxism, we wanted to give more context to the collected faceless photographs that we presented in the installation. We augmented them with collected texts and statistics about immigration and migrants.

The long-term project, which we have been working on since the beginning of our collaboration in 2001, takes the form of a mixed media installation called Unidentified Vietnam, and a 16mm film titled Unidentified Vietnam No. 18. Situated in the present, they are studies into the past.

In 1975, after the fall of Saigon, the US Library of Congress acquired a collection of propaganda films from the South Vietnam Embassy. As we watch these films, all made within the time frame between the 50’s to the early 70’s, we begin to question the policies and politics of that task called nation building.

Our 30 min. film examines the contested relationship between Vietnam and the US. It ponders how US intervention has failed, and considers the dangers of its repetition. We refrain from satisfying the viewer’s desire to visualize the traumas of the past. We do not offer any literal images of war or suffering. Most people, old and young, can readily conjure up such images of violence and victimization from the news, Hollywood movies, the internet, and documentaries. They may not immediately recall the famous images from the Vietnam War, but images from other tragedies and crises too easily come to mind. We avoid what has been called the “pornography of the real” because we feel that images of literal violence cannot be a solution; they never redeem the violence. To us, they can even perpetuate violence, and therefore it is appropriate to think of them as pornographic. Pornography is designed to arouse lust, and that lust does not have to be explicitly sexual; it can also be bloodlust. It is a desire for the spectacle of violence or degradation. [Lust is a craving, appetite, desire]

Instead, we attempt to create a space for viewers to re-imagine the past in light of their lived present. It is important for us that people begin to question their own urges to see, simplify, and contain the devastation that the past has wrought on the present.

So, what is it that the viewer sees, instead of these literal images of the past? We examine the material artifacts of the archive, such as disintegrating labels found inside the film canisters. We studied the archival films, mimicked significant propagandistic gestures, such as a pledge of fidelity to the government and an official at a press conference. We re-enact scenarios from the now non-existent Republic of Vietnam, so that they haunt the emptied halls of the Library. and inserted our own presence into them, re-writing them for ourselves. The hallways of the Library of Congress – a branch of the US government – are designed not unlike a mausoleum. They are sterile, official, almost like storage for the dead. Our re-constructed images are ghostly, reminding us, and the viewers, of what remains unidentifiable in the process of recovering memory. [We can show a brief excerpt of the film at the end of the talk if there’s time.]

Lastly, we want to discuss our parallel project, Unidentified Vietnam. This mixed media installation mobilizes analog, “slow,” or “outmoded” technologies, such as photographs, motion picture film, and sculptural configurations, in combination with “new,” “fast,” digital technologies. This interplay of technologies explicitly references the transitional space and time of regime change.

A signage stand greets you at the gallery entrance, like one you might see in the Library of Congress. On the signage stand is displayed an article from the Washington Star with the headline (as you can see) “South Vietnam Embassy Continues to Carry on in Diplomatic Limbo.” The article details the fall of Saigon and the consequent acquisition of materials by the Library of Congress. This sets the stage for the installation.

The installation is composed of multiple components, which have individual titles that give clues into their meaning. The first component along the length of the wall are 24 film stills which we call “24 frames = 1 second.” This is the speed at which individual images are captured and projected on film so that the human eye perceives them as natural movement in real time, that is, ‘reality’.

What you’re looking at here is Frame #1 of 24 film stills that we grabbed from one second of film time. This one-second of time is called a film ‘wipe’ – a transitional filmic device from the South Vietnam propaganda films, like a dissolve or a fade. The swish pan of light and darkness (the wipe) is employed to move from one scene to the next, or one newsreel to the next.

We took apart these transitional moments – moments that were never meant to be central but merely the exit and entry points between main events – and amplified them in the installation. To us, this transition literally conveys the changeover from one government to the next, one power to its successor. It was the marginalized moment that we weighed with significance. We expanded this fleeting instant - spatially, physically, and temporally - to the time required for a visitor to traverse the 40 feet (or approximately 13 meters) down the length of the wall. We elongated, and therefore emphasized, the time it takes to view what was intended to pass before one’s eyes in one second.

An almost life-size video projection of the Library’s nightly cleaning crew is aligned to the floor. Mopping is a repetitive exercise, an action that in some ways is never complete. The cleaners in the video come toward us naturally, but when they move away from us, the viewer notices that their actions are reversed. The reversed motion calls to mind a receding into the past and suggests that as much as we move toward the future we are haunted by and drawn backwards to the past. After a war or crisis, crews are sent in for ‘mop-up operations’ - their mission is to eliminate remnants of enemy resistance, but they cannot wipe it out, nor can they erase the past. Theirs is a failed attempt at erasure.

[(DOD, NATO) The liquidation of remnants of enemy resistance in an area that has been surrounded or isolated, or through which other units have passed without eliminating all active resistance.]

The failure to erase the past is reiterated by a figure erasing an imaginary blackboard shown as a 16mm film loop. This sculptural component is called “Pupils of Democracy.” It uses some of the vocabulary of a school classroom to reference the attempt of governments to teach people and nations how to “do” democracy. The South Vietnamese, at the time, became pseudo “students” of Western democracy, under the advisement of the U.S., as they also continued to live with the legacy of French colonialism. Here the film projector stands on a stack of books about Vietnamese history, militarism, and propaganda that are piled on a kindergarten school table. Our re-enactment underscores the demand to conform to model roles. This figure mimes the ideal citizen, the well-behaved post-colonial subject donning a Western white suit.

The last component of the installation we’re going to talk about today is based on the traditional library card catalog. It is kind of a ghostly and partial imitation of a real card catalog. We made a personalized archive in which the subject headings note key phrases selected from interviews we compiled. The beginning of the card catalog is “Abandon your weapons,” as you see here.

This sculpture borrows the language of cataloguing but points to the failure of complete comprehension. On one side of the card are excerpts from interviews and related research; on the reverse are images of film canisters and the Library’s architecture. This component of the installation calls into question the task of archiving, preservation, and historicization. One could call it a ‘counter-archive.’ Images from the propaganda films are not visible here, nor is there the referential data that one expects to help locate the films. Instead, we have preserved the containers and commentaries about the films. Our archive is characterized by a deficiency of historical images. Unlike functional card catalogues, these cards do not refer to the institutionalized history but to the personal recollection of history.

On the soundtrack, we hear the voices of a historian, film scholar, librarian, and South Vietnamese-in-exile, who speculate upon the intention of the war-era films. Rather than hearing a single, authoritative commentator give you the official history of Vietnam/US relations, we give you multiple voices that make up a contingent, personal, and non-authoritative recollection of that time.

The installation presents an environment that echoes our working process. Our own research is similar to archaeology - we invite viewers to engage with the process of excavation, to enter a space of suspension in order to contemplate the inscription of history, power, and memory. We aspire to recover memory by initiating a haunting of the present by the past. Simultaneously, the present reverberates within the past, affecting a vibration between contemporary events and their historical precedents. We like to think of the work as initiating a dialogue between past and present that takes place in the ‘now.’


* Excerpts from Cabinet
November 1, 1991 As a result of the Orderly Repatriation Programme, her plastic shopping bag is packed with clothes collected from donations. Some people dress in their best clothes. Two days ago they wore the same outfits for group photos. This time they didn’t smuggle the film out to be developed. It will be done cheaper in Vietnam. She waits with 59 others to be repatriated. At the airport, Hong Kong Correctional Services Officers form a barricade lest anyone try to escape. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees will give her US$50 when she registers in Vietnam.
May 15, 1980 She squats in line with the others, a first of many lines: waiting to identify herself, waiting for the bathroom, waiting for cans of beans, instant noodles and Tang. A well-known Vietnamese song is amplified and distorted through loudspeakers: “Tomorrow you leave; the sea remembers your name; calls it to return . . .” The song was banned both in North and South Vietnam, but here it is played freely each time fellow campmates leave for their new countries.