COLLECTIONS
Immigrated Plants, 2021, Single channel video, 13 min 48 sec, Edition 1/5
All images courtesy of the artist, Photo by Shimoda Manabu
How can the Vietnamese plants adapt themselves to survive in a new environment? Why they are illegal to bring in nowadays? Why the smells and tastes of foods/drinks/traditional medicines from home vegetables and herbs are important to Vietnamese people? What are the journeys behind their stories to have immigrating plants? This project focuses on a dialogue between the ‘Natural and Human Power’ relationship, and its impact on our mentality and our daily life.
Most of the plants nowadays are immigrated along our history because nature, wind, human, animals....
The colonized period was the biggest movement to spread plants from continents to other continents on this planet. They wanted to exploit labor, local resources, and making money to provide for their countries. Some examples such as in Vietnam, in 19th century French colonizer brought rubber tree, cafe tree, pepper tree...to grow and provide for their country; in 1944, Japanese colonizer came to Vietnam, they cut off rice tree to grow Jute tree to make gun powder, army clothes to provide for their war. In Taiwan, Dutch colonizer brought Custard apple tree, cactus, grass apple tree, mango,... for their uses; the colony period of German in Africa in the 19th century when German stretched the cotton plantations across East Africa to provide for their big textile factories in Europe. And nowadays, many rich countries banned all the seeds, fruits, or plants go into their countries from immigrants or travelers.
Vietnamese plants are be collected from Vietnamese families around Osaka.
Photo by Shimoda Manabu
Photo by Shimoda Manabu
Tuan Mami
Lives and works in Hanoi. He is an interdisciplinary-experimental artist, working with site-specific installation, video, performance and conceptual art, who constantly explores new mediums, means and methods of evolving with reflective questioning, and social research.
His focus deals with questions about life, social interactions between people, and people with their environment, to re-construct situations into ones that engage people or objects from particular reality to enter and involve together in a social process.
Other than being as a creator, he has Co-founded MAC-Hanoi, (2012); Being Co-founder and board-member of Nha San Collective in Hanoi since 2013 till now; Visiting Faculty at San Francisco Art Institute, USA in 2013; Co-founder and Artistic director of Á Space- An Experimental Art Space from 2018 till now.
