Who are around you ...

Before, I tend to took pictures of beautiful scenes.
Now it's not that important to judge beauty is always beautiful.
I have just come back from the market near my house and took great moments of the late market. It was not noisy and hurried like in the morning but have a special light laid over everything. It's time for the shop owners begin to clean their places, close the shops, quickly sell for late buyers and for night shops to be opened.

Beautiful scenes can be anywhere as long as you could feel its moment and specialty.
Take your camera with you and took pictures from people around you. Those will be moments can never be replaceable.




Pictures taken at 5:35 pm, Dakao Market, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City

Be a child again

I accidentally knew one site that use pictures to tell story. This is interesting and remind me of the time when we were young. We are taught to see picture and develop the content. It's one way to increase our imagination and logical arrangement. Let's take a look at the cute pictures below and see how it creates the concept. Then try making one and let your friends guess the content (^.<)

Sources: Flickr

SURVEY

Watching the video was shown yesterday at ALBB screenings, I found this interesting for you. I will make a survey outside soon. But I want your opinion first about this.

Please answer the 2 questions belows:


If I collect enough comments from you, I will surely make a new entry posting your comments on it. :)

Thank you!

Coffee again

This time I won't upload other works about coffee like in Coffee Painting entry. I will show mine instead. However, it's not a painting but a flash about coffee that I made for my last Multimedia Engineering assignment. I'm not good at flash and have to search tutorials in many web pages. One interesting about Flash, to me, is that: seeing your successful, final work always worth what you have poured out for. That's why at the deadly hurried point for every assignments, I found myself still strangely calm and focused. I finished a short flash after 1 and a half day sticking my eyes on the monitor. My younger sister found it a waste of time, but she's still too young to understand what I tried to get through and become. You guys can see that it is easy to make but I myself pleased with the work because I've understood many more things using flash. I began flash with nothing, there should be time for me to feel proud, right? :D

Hope that you can see the flash. Enjoy :)
It can take some minutes to view the flash. But it will work.

Winners of the 2006 YAGP for HCM City
and

PERFORMATIVITY
1st Southeast Asian Performance for Video Showcase 2006

Ending my weekend day with my tired eyes. I got one interesting evening with, once again, albb activities. This time, also has talks but moreover, has screenings. I'd love to see films.

There are talks of 4 people (artists and photographers) : Ngo Dinh Truc, Lam Hieu Thuan, Le Vo Tuan, Lieu Nguyen Huong Duong. There could have been more, but for some personal problems, just 4 of them showing their work. They are the winners of Young Artists Grant Program (YARP) for Ho Chi Minh City. Each work expressed a different aspect through the life around them and has quite clear personal remark.
_ Le Vo Tuan with the video clip "I and Myself" is quite strange. There is him but being manipulated and each "him" was flown into a different place, different situation. The clips was recorded in many places like Vietnam and Singapore to express thoughts inside each places.
You can see the picture below to have the idea


_ Ngo Dinh Truc is actually a photographer but his work this time has one collection that he edited and played with the existing pictures (they're not his work) about Saigon. The main color is in gray scale. He also has another collection which expresses about the same characters, same shape, same colors of objects, and from them we can develop to humanity concepts.



_ Lam Hieu Thuan with the series about Apartments in Saigon is very impressive. There are people's life varied in the building. Though the rooms at the department are the same, but the decorations, the life style, the arrangement, the activities made each one a different view. They are old, messy and lumbered but that’s the reason I love them, very Vietnamese. As you know, every house needs a private space, but every daily activity here seemed to be all open. Many sides and concepts in those pictures, if you have a chance in the future, you should take a look at them ^^
_ Lieu Nguyen Huong Duong: an artist that made me admire of the painting skill. He has a personal remark on his work: the stroke variation. I saw 3 of his works about 3 different topics: people, nature (1 for waves and one for forests, flowers). The ability to use strokes, in his work is really impressive and brilliant. He uses long lines and dots in his work but we won’t see the repetition. What we see is just the big whole work was gather by those small elements. I hardly believe those are paintings because the lighting and details are so real.

The remaining time we saw videos that recorded about the process and final works. That's pretty long and kind of too many repetition. At the end of the show, we are told that those video were just for playing during the exhibition. We go to and fro to see Art Work and watch the video for information. So that is much more pleasant than we did this evening - sitting still and watch the whole long video :)

VO VIET CHUNG with MỸ A SILK
" Cô Ba Xứ Việt"

That’s quite a long time that I can choose the next topic for my blog. Now I got one, informatics and arty. I had a chance yesterday to see the Mai Vang Award that is one of the big events in Art Activities in Vietnam every year.

The stage was great and designed impressively with light effect. That’s what I thought to be nicest impression of the show and tend to walk away to do something else.
But I quickly changed my mind and could not move my eyes out of the television when the fashion collection of Vo Viet Chung named “Cô Ba Xứ Việt” came to the stage in the very impressive background sound. I immediately recognized the material he used as his major choice in his recent collections, that is My A Silk (Lãnh Mỹ A – the representation for Tân Châu Silk) but the surprising fact here is this is the nicest collection compared to the previous ones. This time, he focuses on the main and traditional color of this silk: black, deep black and make simple but effective decoration. I was like totally driven back to the visual imaginary scenes I had through Vietnamese literature lessons in high schools, with many stories fulfilled with the Southern taste. There the woman wore that kind of silk (mostly for pants) considered to be expensive and is the desire of many women at that time. If you read stories about the life of Southern people many years ago, you can see that when the author describe a girl or a woman that wears Tan Chau Silk pants or clothes, they’re supposed to live in the high class and have good life condition. Moreover, Tan Chau Silk increase the luxurious and elegant manner of the people wearing them. Vo Viet Chung has developed and created more kinds of clothes rather than just pants; for example, using My A Silk to sew Ao Dai, dress, carves and many more necessaries for daily use (bags, shoes …) and decoration purposes in the near future..

Unfortunately, it had such a long time being forgotten. People, even ones living in Tan Chau, no longer wear this silk like they used to do before, only the elder in the area still wear them. This is a great loss for Vietnamese materials and Vo Viet Chung finally brought it back successfully. I got the news that UNESCO Vietnam highly appreciates Vo Viet Chung’s passion and effort to protect and bring back the traditional material. This is the nice price for Vo Viet Chung that contains Mai Vang Award and many more International Awards.

I have some pictures about the collection “Co Ba Xu Viet” below and some facts about the way to make My A Silk that I have collected from many sources and tried to translate to share with you. Hope you will find these information useful and interesting

Facts about the way to make My A Silk:

_ Have to choose good quality silk to make My A Silk

_ Weave the silk cord

_ People use Mặc Nưa fruit (see the picture below) to be as the important stuff for dyeing: it is grinded into powder then put into kerchief to take out black liquid for dyeing

+ On average, we need 100kg Mặc Nưa for every 20 meters silk (1 typical unit measurement for silk)

+ Every 20 meters silk has to be plunged 100 times into black liquid to be totally absorbed. Each time being plunged, people have to use hand tightly wringing and setting them out to dry.

+ People have to consider which day that best suits to dry silk (it has to have good sunny light to be able to dry silk 4 times per day. If not, the silk quality will be bad).

+ We need totally 40 days for dyeing and drying

+ The hiring cost for 1 worker doing this is: 120, 000 – 150,000 VND/ unit silk

+ Because the hiring cost is high and the time making silk is long so that the price for 1m is 100,000 VND

If any of you want to hear the radio about the interview of Vo Viet Chung, visit this link

Sources:
[link1]

[link2]

[link3]

[link4]

UNCLEAR

The previous post was hard and took times like its name “Observing”. Sometimes, to observe is not as easy like a paper is wet by the water, quick and immediate. Here that we very slowly received the flow of sense floating around and settling down in our mind. It’s interesting or not to unfold something depends on the thing you want to discover and your current mood. Let’s look at the picture below

What do you see?Ten vaguely Victorian-style illustrations of acrobats, precise vertical red hairlines, and a Baldessariesque black dot ?

Or something else?

We have studied about Typography and its rules to effectively express and display the word within its content. What we mostly aim to is learning to make types clear and the content sensible. But what actually happened to Michael Bierut the author of “Now you see it” is slightly different. He figured the picture out after such a long time trying to look at it. Sometimes, yes, sometimes the problems reveals only when we less notice. This made him both feel pity and exciting. He asked his friend who designed this book cover if anyone stupid like him and was replied that many people also could not figure out what the arrangement really mention about. But the editor liked it, he wanted it to be exactly like that, not clearer. So it is launched to confuse people and make itself a question to be solved.

So unclear is also an art, right?

Sources:

Now You See It

Observing ...

In the previous post, I mentioned about the creativity process I myself felt and experienced through my first work at school. Then I accidentally saw again one post in Design Observer that wrote about Graphic Design vs. Illustrator. Have to say that there is something in life you just can feel it in the right time when you already link with all the matters around it. I have read this entry once, but I just skimmed and quickly felt bored, the author mentioned some historic figures and made me go out of the point. But now, when I reread it, word by word, sentence by sentence, I could understand and begin to “observe”. When I compared and thought back what I have seen and experienced, his words really touched my feeling and there could be no better expression about them then he did.

He said: “Visual communication was colonized by tough-minded, business-driven graphic designers who gave their clients what they wanted: branding, strategy and the precision-tooled delivery of commercial messages”. I don’t want to say again what I’ve said in the previous blog but this is the reality. We go to school to learn what we expected to learn but there’s always barrier to challenge us to pass in reality.

“In a culture that values commerce above all other things, the imaginative potential of illustration has become irrelevant... Illustration is now too idiosyncratic”
Milton Glaser

Graphic design needs to do a lot with communication compared to illustration itself; therefore, graphic design was quickly adopted. Illustration, in the other hand, was thought to become too personal and related to social figures. This made me think. Why people can easily adopt what is popular but begin to struggle with what is deep and strange? We cannot say which one is better and should be developed more because each of them has its own value. If the artist can stay up all night to finish his paintings then the graphic designer gets the same thing with tons of unnamed stuffs. There is really a relationship, why they cannot be judged equally? And when we can make them to become equal? That turns back to social figures, doesn’t it?

John Carey, the English academic has a book that said about the absolute measure in artistic worth. He mentioned about visual art and stated that there is no defining yardstick for this. Anything we choose to call art, is art. It’s all about the matter of personal choice. Once again, we meet at the point about personality. So it’s like a circle, no start, no end but I think it should be like that. Like us, I like orange but you like blue, what makes us different from each other is in fact the element made the world vary and develop. There should be “difference” to lead us to discover the new.

Sources:
Graphic Design vs. Illustration

Creativity Process and Reality

I currently had my first design work launched in December, 2006. This is my first time working with a group to promote one big event in my school. I joined to have more practical experiences in designing and practicing technical terms I have learned in class. I had learned many more things from the higher semester students, also had chances to see more hidden problems in preparing a marketing plan. I had to face not only the graphic problems, I mean ... technical problems while working with Photoshop, Illustrator or iMovie , I also need self-confidence, determination and stand point to protect my work after it's finished. To me, receiving feedback made me have 2 different feelings, the feeling about feedbacks coming from the ones that know the sensitiveness of the maker and the ones who don't. I don't mind explaining my choice for the layout or colors in my work but there are barriers and distances between the maker and the viewer's viewpoint and purposes. As a result, your final work can be totally different from the original one if you cannot protect your viewpoint and persuade others to accept it. It's really a big deal.
This made me think of the future when there is money and position that can bend your mind and make you loose your determination, loose your style, and over all, loose the concept. I worked with design student and also commerce ones. So there are two different thoughts and it's hard to pleased both of them. That's what I should encounter.

I wrote this entry just to share my first experience after my first work was launched. Reality is really different from theory and can varied in steps and process. It won't work with just design and concepts, it will be consensus, fighting, protecting and fixing. What I want to advice you in doing design work with a group is trying to protect your work, listen to the feedback that can help you improve your work and never give up.

TRAN THANH SANG with his VISUAL TOUR

New year is coming … so let me write about one of the “new” in Vietnamese Art activities in Ho Chi Minh City. There was an exhibition at Thong Nhat Palace and Tran Van Sang’s project is considered to be an important and impressive one.

Tran Van Sang is a photographer so his work firmly related to the images but in a more creative and practical way. Keeping in mind a way to be able to introduce and promote Vietnam to foreigners is his ambition and finally he could do it with “visual tour”, a online tour which you can view many famous places in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City, Khai Dinh Masoleums, Van Mieu, My Son ...) just by clicking on the arrows to view 360 degrees of the landscapes.

This is not a new invention but it could prove that Vietnamese can do it and there can be more applications in the future, which would help Vietnam to develop and contribute for public purposes. Thank you Sang for showing us his work, not only for us to admire, to learn from but also inspired and encourage us to do something new and practical. Our work just not like showing people the photos, the images, but can do a lot more than that if we have passion, dream and efforts.

Here is his website , you can visit there and try “visual tour” to see what I have talked about. This function needs java to run and you can install it through his website. I myself didn’t have chance to visit places in the Middle and the Northern Vietnam so this works perfectly to give me the overall views about how the places really are. Feeling bored of seeing what’s in front of you? Take his tour and see what’s really behind your back. Have a nice trip!

Sources :

TranThanhSang Website

ThanhNienOnline

HOW TO STUDY ARTIST'S WORKS and ...

"When I study the work of any artist, I'm absorbing the source of that art, which is the individual who created it. Every moment of one's entire life influences the process, and it's those life experiences that inform the spirit, the life and breath of the work.

I have an insatiable hunger for images of all kinds and also a desire to analyze the values and the abstract qualities that are the answer to most compositions."
Henry Casselli

So there is way to learn from other artist's work. This does not mean you copy the work, but practise to see Art work in its variety and catch the outstanding point, the special style and undestand them through artist's background, then find for you your own style with your own vision.

I have seen many styles from my friends when I was studying secondary and high school. We tend to copy the style and as a result, it became a trend, then what's your real style actually? How can you break that influence and create your own?

What have you learned from your friends' work?

COFFEE PAINTINGS

Mira Chudasama

Who love coffee maybe feel interesting with this Art Painting. Mira Chudasama really made a fascinating step into Art with her strange paint. The idea came up with the fact that they already knew Chinese use tea powder to pain, then … why not coffee? They tried and found out pigment coffee gives more depth and well express with old-look effect in the painting.

One more interesting fact is that they use 100% pure coffee to make the paint. We can see that the coffee color is much like the color of wood so if you take a look at their gallery, you can see this method works well on those paintings that related to forest, wooden things, still object or animal.

Besides working with Coffee, they also paint pictures with water color, eggs, acrylic, glass and mosaic

So there is anything that art can use to create masterpiece. “Coffee now goes arty too”

References
Art and Painting [link1]; [link2]; [link3]
Coffee Paintings by Mira Chudasama

FREE NEW ZEALAND ART

Participating in Art Activities made me feel interesting these days. They led me not only to a real world to enjoy Art works but a place to experience and meet people.

The concept "free Art", like I thought, is like an exhibition that we can obtain Art, feel Art in a certain place. Keeping that in mind but I always wonder if the artist make an exhibition, so where is the budget and what will they get back from the exhibition? That night, I was over-surprised with what New Zealand Art brought to us.

Participants can get copies of the NZ artists' work, and all are free. If they're just a small cards or A4, then I would highly appreciate. It was more than that; each of them is a huge and well printed poster. Although holder tubes were sold during the party, the attitude is still there, a really free Art night.

Joining the party like this, you have chance to talk to people you don’t know, or meet friends to share thoughts, together comment art work. Moreover, if you know some people that volunteer for the show preparation, you will have more experiences. It’s useful for you in the future to become an artist or a designer.

A friend told me that this Art party was made with the support of ALLB (A Little Bla Bla) and New Zealand Artist Group with the desire to introduce the Artists’ Art Works as well as bring Art to Vietnam, a country that step by step join the Art World. This is much more than I can imagine about the party.

Thank you for bringing this Art night to Vietnam so we can have chance to learn new things and exchange ideas.