Hong-An Truong, Adaptation Fever

Adaptation Fever (2006-2007)
multi-channel video installation
black & white digital video with sound
Total running time: 15 minutes

Part 1
The Past is a Distant Colony
9 minutes

Part 2
It’s True Because It’s Absurd
3 minutes

Part 3
Explosions in the Sky
3 minutes

This trilogy of discrete video works approaches the archive through appropriation and disruption. Using found footage of Viet Nam during its French Colonial period to explore questions about the politics of representation and the construction of identity and difference in relation to history, time, and memory. The split screen and juxtaposition becomes a simple technique whereby the “real” and by extension, its historical referent, are permanently deferred objects, further diminished through the overdubbed narratives in Vietnamese and French which are only tersely summarized in English subtitles. Playing with the idea that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience, and also by the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the Other’s desire for that present, this video appropriates archival moving images of French colonial Viet Nam as a way to consider postcolonial subjectivity and sentimentality.

Hong-An Truong is an artist based in Brooklyn. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Visual Studies Workshop. Her photographs and videos have been shown at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum in Queens, the International Center for Photography in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum, Oakland University Art Gallery, and DobaeBacsa Gallery in Seoul. Her work was included in 1968: Then and Now at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work was screened in this year’s PDX Documentary and Experimental Film Festival and was recently included in a group show at Art in General in NY and a screening at DeSoto Gallery in Los Angeles. Upcoming shows include a solo show at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University in North Carolina, and group shows at Gallery 456 at the Chinese American Arts Council in NY, BRIC Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn, and Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles. Truong received her MFA at the University of California, Irvine and recently completed the Whitney Independent Study Program.

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