hanoi food

Hanoi food
Performance - Installation by artist Nguyen Xuan Long
Exhibition 5000 Hoan Kiem lakes of project City of Arts: Planning for a Future Hanoi by Visual Artists, with support from the Danish Cultural Development and Exchange Fund (CDEF) - National Fine Arts Museum, Ha Noi, April 2007.
Idea:
Which shape Hanoi will take in the future depends very much on its citizens
knowledge and awareness, culture and preferences. All these aspects influence Hanoians
choice of a way to combine the traditional and the modern, national identification and globalization in their future capital city.
This interactive performance and installation artwork mainly aims at raising awareness for Hanoians of their ownership of the city they are living in. The artwork encourages reflection and consideration about responsibility of Hanoi citizens to their home city, which is needed for
decision-making about the future of Hanoi and the path it should follow.
Description:
The artist is dressed in a chef clothing, invites guests to enjoy a buffet of Hanoi foods. These foods, hidden in a number of cookers, include miniatured items modifying real objects of Hanoi urban life and imaginative popular figures, such as trees, pagodas, old style houses, bicycles, cyclos, motobikes, cars, people, animals, supermen, etc., which are mixed with thin paper strips cut out from various articles on Hanoi in the past and ar present.
Participants in the artwork explore themselve what are contained inside the cookers; pick up those items they would like to maintain in the future city, including those paper strips with their favourite messages. They then will arrange their selected food items on disposable plates which are painted with blue clouds to symbolise the works imagination and relativeness; and then put the plates on one of the white-coloured skyscraper-similar stands which are different in size and height, and positioned in a way that give the familiar impression of a modern city crowded with buildings. Participants can also express more of their opinions and wishes by writing on different coloured cards and stick the cards on the stands so that everyone
can read.
After the real interactive work in the openning evening, a video featuring the activity is run side by side with the installated future city scenarios created by the participants.

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Tags:

• contemporary
• vietnam
• artist