ZeroStation is attracting some of the most experimental artists from Ho Chi Minh City and beyond. Johnny Rebours meets the gallery’s curator to find out about the merits of creating dialogue. Photos by EJ Chung
The dialogue he speaks so impassionedly of is between the artist and the world around them. In a city famed for it’s reproductive artworks scanned onto screens and filled in with oil paints, Huy’s vision is defiantly original.
Having graduated from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 1997, Huy received scholarships to study in France and America. Picking the latter, he sites his time in North America as “a very important moment. Art there was not like what we were taught in university in Vietnam”.
His mind had been exposed to new forms of art and expression, and with a group of likeminded friends, he founded an online contemporary arts magazine in Vietnam upon his return.
Spending two years collectively running the publication, and bearing the financial burden on their own shoulders, Huy and his contemporaries were eventually forced to close the website down. “We needed to earn money to live,” he chuckles, now able to reminisce fondly on those hand-to-mouth days.
Although a big hit on the Asian arts scene, and certainly a first in Vietnam, Huy decided a change of direction was needed. Joining his friends from Japan and Australia in the art collective ‘a little blah blah’ appears to have sewn the seeds that form the basis of his ideas that translate into ZeroStation.
During its existence, ‘a little blah blah’ worked closely with local artists to put on workshops, exhibitions and live performances in any venues they could find. They intentionally chose not to have their own physical space, thus giving them greater freedom in the scope and variety of their art. However, the lack of a base meant they couldn’t run any projects in the long-term, something the ambitious Huy struggled with.
Art for All and All for Art
He therefore counts himself lucky when, at the beginning of 2010, he found a space to use as his own and it is here that he has invested many of ideals — the need to be involved in all sections of local community and to provide a space where everyone is free to discuss and express their feelings on contemporary art.
The five full-time staff, including Mifa, Huy’s cheerful general assistant, all aspire to maintain ZeroStation’s core values of “learning by doing” — a reaction to stale university lectures — and learning “how to be moveable between acting and action”.
Changing premises in 2011, ZeroStation now stands at Hem 288, Nam Ky Khoi Nghia in District 3. Entering the alley, the bright yellow garage door stamped with the black ZeroStation/ga 0 logo is impossible to miss, its motto ‘A House for Creativity’ beaming out onto the road.
A bright graffiti piece adorns the wall. According to Huy this project “evolved into a mural, describing the faces of some of the people living here”. Grand and complex, it’s a reflection of an amalgamation of original ideas completed by a mixture of local and foreign artists.
Identity
Huy comes across as a well read individual, knowledgeable in his field. He says French scholar Michel de Certeau inspired him to “follow the rules but keep [his] own identity, [and] interpret the rules into [his] culture”. This is how ZeroStation has been able to stay at the forefront of the contemporary art scene in Vietnam.
He has even invited members of the local authority to attend a workshop to find out their views on contemporary art. “If there is no dialogue, everything would be rules… and if you want to have dialogue, you must be the first one… So I gave them my translation on contemporary art for them to keep!” he chuckles at his ballsy approach.
Two types of artist residency are offered at ZeroStation and are split into ‘Packet’ and ‘Intensive’. In a Packet residency a visiting artist can stay for a week in the accommodation provided upstairs at ZeroStation, on the condition that they contribute somehow to the community, be it via a workshop, concert or performance.
An Intensive residency sees a foreign artist invited for one month to engage in a dialogue with a local artist. The two artists are encouraged to share ideas, evolve, negotiate, argue, create conflict and reach an agreement to eventually produce a piece at the end of the residency.
Hoping to host more of the latter in 2012, along with the Moving Image Weekends series, where contemporary films will be shown to the public on Saturdays and Sundays beginning in January, ZeroStation is always evolving.
For further information, visit www.zerostationvn.org
Source: http://www.wordhcmc.com/features/item/2122-ground-zero
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