For a 'Studio Walkthrough' See below transcription.
Uudam lives and works in HoChiMinh City, Vietnam. He was born into an artist family in Kontum, central highland of Việt Nam. Having attended the University of Fine Arts in Sài Gòn (HCMC) as a young artist, he takes a strong lead from his late father, also an artist, who abandoned the war in the 70s and was sent to a re-education camp, before the family was able to move to the USA, where Uudam studied at UCLA and then achieved his Master of Fine Arts at School of Visual Arts in NYC.
His work ranges from conceptual sculpture, drawing, installations and video to robotics art & performances.
His art provokes with shocking clarity a rethinking of social issues, global power relations, our natural environment that struggles under an overwhelming expansion of cities such as Ho Chi Minh.
He has exhibited widely in many museums and Biennales in Asia, Europe and the US. UuDam is one of the co-founder of the XEM collective.
“Whether the interaction between humans and technology, the tension of political borders between sovereign states, conflicts among humans, the slippage of perception of reality, they are an in-between space, an interface that results in us.” VYgallery.com
Describe yourself in three words.
Artist? Provocative? Stubborn!
So you get to America as a family, the whole family leaves together, right?
Yes, the family leaves together.
And what was his impression? How did he respond to America? And how did you respond?
He loved it. We all loved it.
This is of course the enemy.
You know, we don't think about it as an enemy. No, I don't. If you sit down and you say, "Oh, yeah, you fought America." "What was the real enemy?" Yes, you know, we think, "Yes, there was a time. There was a time that we were enemies." But America has a very favorable viewing of the Vietnamese. Because a lot of enemies fled to America after the war and before the war. And they sent over, you know, a lot of money to help the economy and the relatives here. And so I think you come to Vietnam and you can see its kind of shocking that the animosity between the old enemy, you know, and the Vietnamese virtually didn't exist.
So we went there, you know, with the idea that we want to study at the best universities. We don't ever talk about, it just doesn't come up to our mind that, you know, "Well, that's your enemy teaching you." Not until you get into the conversation and you dissect it. And yeah, okay, who wins, who won, and what happened...
Music: 'Mystical Guzheng Journey' produced by VPRODMUSIC
UuDam's studio walkthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVlm4cMR7YNwm8Hvj7cPyGHdYcj7o23K8