Trang Minh Hoang
Ana Lucía Fernández
trang:
"I have a friend and he is a painter. He has always been painting people and things that directly connect with him and his personal life. At first, I visited his exhibition without knowing him before and I immediately fell in love with his works. To me, his paintings have a powerful voice themselves and they create a space of intimate conversations with their audience.
Recently he is working on a series which he told me that they are totally nonsense. They do not have any meaning. He paints his toys. He loves playing toys such as Lego or characters' figures. When he is playing and arranging a scene of his toys, he finds it interesting so he just paints it. He said: "I am finding something meaningful with these meaningless things." I love his honesty since he is living truthfully and so are his art.
For this week's value, I asked him to pose with his painting so he did a funny facial expression like the duck on his painting. He said that he was having a thought of owning a duck as his pet so he painted it haha. And when I was taking the photos, he said: "Now see me as your toy.""
"I have a friend and he is a painter. He has always been painting people and things that directly connect with him and his personal life. At first, I visited his exhibition without knowing him before and I immediately fell in love with his works. To me, his paintings have a powerful voice themselves and they create a space of intimate conversations with their audience.
Recently he is working on a series which he told me that they are totally nonsense. They do not have any meaning. He paints his toys. He loves playing toys such as Lego or characters' figures. When he is playing and arranging a scene of his toys, he finds it interesting so he just paints it. He said: "I am finding something meaningful with these meaningless things." I love his honesty since he is living truthfully and so are his art.
For this week's value, I asked him to pose with his painting so he did a funny facial expression like the duck on his painting. He said that he was having a thought of owning a duck as his pet so he painted it haha. And when I was taking the photos, he said: "Now see me as your toy.""
Ana Lucia:
"Our humor has mutated into the absurd: The Merriam-Western defines meme as "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media. " They are something that has changed the way we communicate: Language turned from oral, to written, to visual. We have learned to cope and react to the world around us in a way that is perhaps difficult to understand to older generations, it is unique and dynamic, something that developed organically from our desire to communicate and belong. Nowadays, geography is not a limit, we all are interconnected by an everchanging web, and memes are the tokens we use to transmit and convey our concerns.
Another thing that strikes me from internet culture, is the lack of authorship. Memes come from a person but belong to all of us. Each meme is not more than an interpretation, it echoes the ones that are previously made and is a precedent for the ones that will come after. It borrows from real life situations and translates them into images. That is why, for my work, I appropriated John Baldessari's Wrong, 1967. I make fun of the Suez Channel crisis, the same way as I have seen in Reddit or Tiktok, and at the same time pinpoint the absurdity of the situation while stating the obvious, in the same way that Baldessari's work ridicules the ideas of rightness in the arts and photography.
Is this image mine, or does it now belong to the internet? I would like to leave this question open, so you can make your own interpretation."
"Our humor has mutated into the absurd: The Merriam-Western defines meme as "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media. " They are something that has changed the way we communicate: Language turned from oral, to written, to visual. We have learned to cope and react to the world around us in a way that is perhaps difficult to understand to older generations, it is unique and dynamic, something that developed organically from our desire to communicate and belong. Nowadays, geography is not a limit, we all are interconnected by an everchanging web, and memes are the tokens we use to transmit and convey our concerns.
Another thing that strikes me from internet culture, is the lack of authorship. Memes come from a person but belong to all of us. Each meme is not more than an interpretation, it echoes the ones that are previously made and is a precedent for the ones that will come after. It borrows from real life situations and translates them into images. That is why, for my work, I appropriated John Baldessari's Wrong, 1967. I make fun of the Suez Channel crisis, the same way as I have seen in Reddit or Tiktok, and at the same time pinpoint the absurdity of the situation while stating the obvious, in the same way that Baldessari's work ridicules the ideas of rightness in the arts and photography.
Is this image mine, or does it now belong to the internet? I would like to leave this question open, so you can make your own interpretation."