5 Video Clips from Vietnam: Life Imitating Art

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As the climate crisis shows, life is as fragile as ever. While Vietnam has recently faced devastating flooding, independent music scenes attempt to turn the uncomfortable into a new playground. Watch a new episode of the 5 Video Clips from Special curated by the Saigon based music collective Gãy, in which weird sounds and harsh cuts play with our senses.

In 2022 Central Vietnam has faced the worst flooding in 70 years. Vietnam’s latitude puts it at the forefront of global warming’s effects, and part of the country will be submerged within a few decades. We have already begun to see flooded streets in big cities, which has never happened before. This reminds us of how fragile life is. It makes us want to appreciate the little things in life. Even in difficult times, the playfulness and ingenuity of Vietnamese people can turn the uncomfortable and unforeseen into a new playground, adversity into laughter. It reminds us to always look at life with a smile.

With these music videos, we invite people from around the world to take a look at what’s happening in Vietnam in the most raw, casual, natural, and even funny way. These music videos are about life imitating art, life on the streets of Vietnam, or inside people’s houses and relationships. They feature original footage and footage found on the internet. A broken editing style gives a random feeling, as if we are going through fragments of memories and moments of daily lives full of unexpectedness and random events.

Music: Ngọt
Track: Chuyển Kênh
Director: Đỗ Như Trang
Camera: Nghia Minh Phan
Editing: Trung Nguyen

This music video takes place in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. Here, Ngot is questioning the relationships between people, singing about life that passes by every day – just like how you watch the news on TV, constantly changing the channels, or don’t do anything all day at all. Life goes on and we can always change the channel. Whether the channel is a metaphor for one’s perspective on life or not, one can always change when one wants, or simply sit and watch.

Music: Anh Phan feat. Tùng Chùa
Track: Phú Quý Bò Viên
Creative director: Anh Phan, Le Can Truong
Cam OP: Cu Thanh Hoang, Tu, Quan
Editor: Phan Trung Anh, Tri Hoang, Cu Thanh Hoang

This is a fun video that takes place in the streets of Saigon. It samples a «nhạc chế» song («parody music»). Tùng Chùa is singing about the gangster lifestyle and the handcuff that’s keeping him in prison. Anh Phan offers his distinctive style of rapping: a lot of words that don’t really say anything and, at the same time, say everything.

Music: Tran Uy Duc
Track: Catwalk
Camera: Tran Uy Duc, Vudieunongsay (Nguyen Duy Anh)
Editing: Tran Uy Duc

Tran Uy Duc is a rising star in the experimental scene of Vietnam. This latest music video is taken from his second album Came.

Music: Nodey feat. TUIMI
Track: SINH TỐ #03
Footage: Internet
Editing: Nodey

Nodey is a French Vietnamese producer now based in Saigon, Vietnam. He started a YouTube series called Sinh Tố («smoothie»), where he uses samples of traditional instruments to collaborate with local musicians, singers, and rappers. Videos in the Sinh Tố series use Nodey’s personal phone footage and friends’ footage of life in the streets of Vietnam, as well as footage taken from the internet.

Music: Rắn Cạp Đuôi feat. Abi Wasabi
Track: Bloody
Footage: Vietnamemes, Anh Phi
Editing: Celina Huynh

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Ein Beitrag geteilt von Gãy (@nhac_gay)

For Circa Art’s 10^th anniversary, Gãy Collective submitted an art video under the general theme «Where Do We Go From Here?», raising a question about our future. In contrast to solalstagia and dystopian narratives, we embrace radical positivity by acknowledging we are already doomed, channeling the resilience and adaptability that have been our defining ways to navigate through history. Vietnam’s latitude puts it at the forefront of global warming’s effects and part of the country will be submerged within a few decades. Yet the playfulness and ingenuity of Vietnamese can turn the uncomfortable and unforeseen into a new playground. «SỐNG VỚI LŨ» literally means «living with flood». It is also an idiom used for accepting the situation – any situation at all. The video contains footage taken from our personal phones and footage from the internet.

Biography

Gãy is a Saigon-based music & arts collective. We throw rave nights, release electronic music, and lead mental health initiatives. We embrace flaws and oddities, fueled by the desire to connect and explore a shared common identity in constant mutation.

Published on February 02, 2023

Last updated on June 13, 2023

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Filmstill: «The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo», Javier Polo Gandía, 2020.

Being Untrue to Yourself

Short Essay

by Adam Harper

Defining one’s authenticity by being inauthentic is a central mode of being queer – and has become a popular aesthetic. In an essay inspired by the film The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo, our writer asks how the metaphor of the flamingo might offer a route out of a repressive reality.

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One of the fundamental assumptions underlying the cultural climate of postmodernity is that authenticity can be constructed around anything – especially inauthenticity. In fact, an embrace of the inauthentic can be an invitation to subvert and reorder existing paradigms of authenticity. Take the eponymous signifier of The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo, a bird that, as the film shows, has become the quintessence of all that is weird, bad-taste, and carefree.

The elongated hot pink wading bird is hardly a totem of earthy realism, having long been a core member in the menagerie of exotic animals deemed absurd in Western art and literature (alongside the elephant, rhinoceros, zebra, giraffe), and who recur in it to invariably quizzical effect. It is still less traditionally authentic when you factor in the flamingo’s role as the queen of decorative tropical kitsch, as seen in the form of countless millions of plastic lawn ornaments.

Vacation in an Object

And yet it is precisely the flamingo’s symbolizing a departure from present reality that allows it to serve as an invitation to a greater authenticity. If existing reality is staid, dull, repressive, then the flamingo offers a route out. As writer Brian Antoni puts it in the film, «Kitsch is a vacation in an object». One can be true to oneself by acting on one’s dissatisfaction with existing reality and taking up the flamingo’s offer, thereafter becoming someone more honest about themselves and their relation to the world.

This is certainly the trajectory of the film’s main character, Rigo Pex, and that of many of the people he encounters. Pex’s initial passivity is represented in his black clothing, but also in his work as a high-fidelity sound engineer and recordist, which implies an effort of supreme transparency, an artist who subordinates himself to and vanishes into his subject. At the film’s conclusion, Pex makes his own music, and thus becomes Meneo, famed extrovert of electronic music.

Yet amid all this consolatory embrace of camp, one key dimension to this journey of self-discovery is never explicitly noted, even if it is present with all the subtlety of the flamingo itself: Queerness. Even if it does so indirectly, The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo attests that the queer discovery of the authenticity of the inauthentic (and its vice versa) has had an incalculable effect on the aesthetics and semiotics of the contemporary world, and the greater truths lived by so many of those who populate it.

Do You Want to Fly Away?

According to the film’s narrator (who is, it is implied, a flamingo himself), Pex’s journey begins when he is «willing to understand what is inside him that is fighting to come out». Avatars of pink and camp are typically queer-coded, and many of the film’s interviewees exemplify this aesthetically. Filmmaker John Waters and pop culture genius and socialite Allee Willis appear as queer godparents – the former asks him, «Are you looking for a partner that you can’t get near? Maybe that’s it. Do you want to fly away? Flying is always sexual in every dream.»

In one scene, Pex floats naked in a pink sea as he explores the identity he’s been repressing. Pex even begins to tear up as Antoni tells him, «Just don’t worry. Don’t let people tell you what to do, just do what you want to do… People just want to put you in a box, just open the box and jump out.» Leaving this queerness unnamed almost amounts to queerbaiting – but the film’s message is one that is hardly exclusive to the LGBTQ community.

The film «The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo» by Javier Polo Gandía was officially selected at the Norient Film Festival NFF 2021. See full program here.

This text is part of Norient’s essay publication «Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks», published in 2021 as part of the Norient Film Festival 2021.

Bibliographic Record: Rhensius, Philipp. 2021. «Editorial: NFF 2021 Essay Collection.» In Nothing Sounds the Way It Looks, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Lisa Blanning (NFF Essay Collection 2021). Bern: Norient. (Link).

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Biography

Adam Harper has lectured in popular music and culture at City, University of London, Goldsmiths, University of London, and elsewhere. Especially interested in the aesthetics of technology, he was written for Wire, Frieze, The FADER, and Resident Advisor. He published a book on musical possibilities, Infinite Music in 2011.

Published on January 11, 2021

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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