Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba

Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle of Easel Point - Memorial Project Okinawa

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s Memorial Project series, which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unraveled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied, and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II, which became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color. They attack trestles with blank canvases on which they attempt to paint a yellow star but, after a showering of digital white stars likened to the American flag (presumably alluding to Christmassy snow), they find themselves uncontrollably portraying actors who played in Vietnam-related films like Marlon Brando, Michael Cimino, Robert De Niro… which then, end up leading to collapse and dissolving. Water creates a parallel world, symbolic of universal consciousness, which allows for the slow contemplation of these potentially alienating cultural transmissions. Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s dramatized soft critique is across the board, from the sheer weight of Vietnamese tradition on the one hand to America’s geopolitical and cultural hegemony on the other, as well as the way war is represented in the media and in cinema (Vietnam was one of the first conflicts to have broad coverage).