A sea dragon and a mountain fairy lay one hundred eggs
To each land, its origin story. Vietnam is the child of a sea-dwelling father and sky-bound mother. In the earliest of beginnings, the sea dragon Lạc Long Quân swam up rivers to meet the fairy Âu Cơ, residing in the heavens. The two fell in love and from their union, one hundred eggs hatched. The two lovers, however, could not live uprooted from their habitat. The dragon returned to the sea and the fairy to the skies, dividing their human children, the Bách Việt, across land and water.
In Into The Violet Belly (2022), the twenty-minute film by artist Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Vietnam’s creation myth leaks into another lineal tale: that of the artist’s mother, fleeing Vietnam after the end of the American War, which again divided the country’s children across land and water. Mid-film, the two tales converge on a black-sand beach where the artist, her mother, and large, thick, white eggs lie. The landscape emits the deep and slow cracks of a giant’s body awaking. In the following scene, the earth rotates until the ground is above the sea, and the sky below. With sea and sky expanding on the lower half of the screen, gas and water become ground. This earth and world revolution signals a shift of vantage points: from this moment onward, the film is set underwater. From an immersion in air to a submersion in water, Nguyen-Chi proposes new environmental conditions from which to narrate.
In Vietnamese, land, nation, homeland, as well as water, share the same expression: nước. The expression’s elemental multiplicity erodes earthly understandings of ground and resonates with the estrangement of terrestrial perspectives at play in Into The Violet Belly (2022)—from the reversal of sky, sea, and land, to the underwater filming. Land-based ways of thinking about ground characterize it as something that is fixed, reliable, or static: the expression grounded in habitually comes to define what is firmly based in objective research or fact. In contrast, the ground we access via nước and Into The Violet Belly finds roots in gas and water’s shapelessness and errancy; no base is ever firm, no foundation absolute, and no origin definite. In the dampness of the word nước, and in the weather-world suggested by Into The Violet Belly, Nguyen-Chi asks: how to tell a story?
“Assemblage 2,” 2023, designed by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani. Courtesy of the artists (see full citation information below).
A woman who cannot swim jumps into the ocean
Across the film’s terraqueous milieu, Nguyen-Chi revisits the immensity of one gesture: that of a jump. In 1979 the artist’s mother, a twenty-something woman who does not know how to swim, jumped from a fishing-turned-refugee boat into the South China Sea to escape Thai pirates. In the film, the jump is performed by the artist and the mother, following the latter’s instructions. Shot from underwater, as if narrated by the sea, this scene multiplies itself. It first appears without context mid-film, shown on a screen in the editing room, where mother and daughter watch and comment—one of the many instances where the work shows its stitches, dragging us out of the film into its making, negotiating the absolute of narration. The jump reappears a few scenes later, repeated seven times in a loop, accompanying the mother’s narration of the gesture, just before the penultimate scene of the film.
I found the mother’s jump—a small leap, toward death, for liberation—at the confluence of what Elvia Wilk, in Death by Landscape, puts her finger on while speaking about apocalyptic literature, via Doris Lessing’s writing. For Lessing, apocalypse is the hidden subject of all literature, which she describes as the site where human hope and human failure meet, revealing “the simultaneity of the quotidian, the disastrous, and the transcendent that make up the human condition on Earth,” Wilk writes. The film, indeed, balances the cataclysmic with the familiar lightness of the quotidian and a galvanizing form of transcendence.
Twice, during the first and second half of the film, Nguyen-Chi asks her mother to remember. We hear the artist guiding her—“Please wait ten seconds before you speak”—and witness her changing the lens of the camera, showing the film’s stitches yet again. When the mother recollects, her tone is at times light and almost playful, as when she recounts, whilst holding a chicken, how she comically fooled policemen into thinking she was an egg seller, permitting another origin story seepage. This lightness allows the film to chronicle the parent’s disaster without indulging in pathos. It does, however, grip you with a vertiginous closeness to the mother’s pain. In November 2022, during their public conversation titled “A Taxonomy of Silences,” novelists Anuk Arudpragasam and Senthuran Varatharajah spoke of the necessary silence accompanying the pain of the parent that enables the child to continue to love them. Nguyen-Chi negotiates, but does not break, this pressing silence. Sculpting the ebb and flow between light and shadow, speech and non-speech, mundane and tragic, the artist produces a site where the disastrous, nested within the quotidian, can be fathomed without crushing her, and us, under its pressure, and where we are capable of loving the submerged mother.
“Assemblage 3,” 2023, designed by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani. Courtesy of the artists (see full citation information below).
The science fiction of survival
If survival is implied by the mother’s presence on screen, then the means to such continuance remains unsaid. In this very silence lies the science fiction of survival. Or: the science fiction of breath. Exhibited as part of the 12th Berlin Biennale at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Nguyen-Chi’s installation This undreamt of sail is watered by the white wind of the abyss (2022) was composed of a blue-chroma screen placed on the floor for viewers to lie on while watching Into The Violet Belly on another screen hung from the ceiling. The blue-chroma screen, which we also see on film, is yet another scaffolding the artist consciously made visible. Others included a director’s chair, on which audience members could sit to watch the installation, as well as white tracking markers positioned on the blue screen, usually used as coordinates by visual-effects artists. Large ostrich eggs, cracked open, were scattered on top of the blue screen alongside the sculpture of a boat mutating into a hospital bed. A laryngeal mask, a medical device used as a method to temporarily keep a patient’s airway open, was placed in a corner of the blue screen and had a cyanobacteria culture growing inside its tube.
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, “This undreamt of sail is watered by the white wind of the abyss,” 2022. Single-channel film installation.
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, installation view, 12th Berlin Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 11.6.–18.9.2022. Photo: Jens Franke / Art and Architecture Documentation.
Cyanobacteria emerged from freshwater environments around 3.5 billion years ago. They began appearing on earth during the Archean Era, when the atmosphere was made of gases too toxic for our breathing. Generating oxygen and transforming solar energy into matter, the bacteria are at the origin of plants: “sun-powered engines” allowing for breath, the condition of our living, as Emanuele Coccia puts it in his 2018 essay The Cosmic Garden. In the text, the philosopher thinks of plants as the gardeners of our Earth. For him, plants’ oxygen production and photosynthesis signify that the real object of gardening is the sky, not the soil. Agriculture, then, is celestial, and breath is “nothing other than the germinal movement of what, on a global, cosmic scale, is called atmosphere, and conversely, climate is the breath of a cosmos.” Installed alongside the cyanobacteria and the laryngeal mask, Into The Violet Belly brought into relation the primordial breath, the submerged mother’s science-fictional survival, the climate, and the cosmos, in an expanded gasp: the beginning of one’s breath is the other’s beginning is the other’s beginning. These constant returns recall poet Kamau Brathwaite, whose term submerged mother I borrow for the title of this essay, and his notion of tidalectics, calibrated to the cyclical ebb and flow of the ocean and of breath.
“Assemblage 4,” 2023, designed by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani. Courtesy of the artists (see full citation information below).
Amniotic currents
As hinted throughout this text, the infrastructure of Nguyen-Chi’s Into The Violet Belly is always visible—as if the stories were undoing themselves in front of the viewer’s eye. Blue screens, director’s instructions and chair, camera lenses, editing room, and many other components of the craft lay in plain sight. Yet none of this transparency takes away the potency of the film’s science fictions. Rather, showcasing the making becomes an act of untelling that stands alongside the telling—a way of complicating stories and origin myths and their usual, dangerous fantasy of objectivity, purity, and truth. Likewise, the silence (the non-telling) surrounding the mother’s survival underwater, where breath finds its refuge, becomes another language. Rising from the wet ground of nước, Nguyen-Chi’s filmic installations take the erratic sky and sea as the environmental conditions for the emergence of a grammar able to articulate irresolute stories.
From the Archean Era to the origins of Vietnam, from the American war in Vietnam to today, from a mother’s apocalypse to another’s, Into The Violet Belly’s practice of telling, untelling, and non-telling offers a narrative of life carried forth by the amniotic currents of sea, embryo, egg, and breath. These vital tidalectics embrace the push and pull of freshwater cyanobacteria, bloody militarized currents, and the sappy homeland scattered across land and sea.
Image Credits:
Assemblage 1 (cover)
designed by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani
Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body, 1987, oil, pastel and aerosol paint on canvas, 198.1 x 147.6 cm. © The Estate of Francis Bacon
Miriam Cahn, Mare Nostrum, 2008 + 27.6.17, 2017, oil on canvas, 190 × 180 cm. © Miriam Cahn and Pinault Collection
Kim Ki-duk, The Isle, 2000, film, colour, sound, 90 min, film still © CJ Entertainment
Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Ocean Bird Washup), 1974, film, colour, no sound, 5 min, film still © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Into The Violet Belly, 2022, film, colour, sound, 20 min, film still © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, This undreamt of sail is watered by the white wind of the abyss, 2022, installation view, 12th Berlin Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 11.6.–18.9.2022, photo: Jens Franke © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, 1980, gelatin silver print, 42.1 x 54.5 cm. © Cleveland Museum of Art
Dalena Tran, Into The Violet Belly, draft (animation scene), 2022. © Dalena Tran
Assemblage 2
designed by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani
Ingmar Bergman, Cries and Whispers, 1972, film, colour, sound, 91 min, film still © The Criterion Collection
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Into The Violet Belly, 2022, film, colour, sound, 20 min, film still © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Edward Yang, Yi Yi, 2000, film, colour, sound, 173 min © The Criterion Collection
Assemblage 3
designed by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani
Francis Bacon, Two figures at a window, 1953, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 116.5 cm. © The Estate of Francis Bacon
Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966, film, black & white, sound, 83 min, film still © The Criterion Collection
Kim Ki-duk, The Isle, 2000, film, colour, sound, 90 min, film still © CJ Entertainment
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Into The Violet Belly, 2022, film, colour, sound, 20 min, film still © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, The In/Extinguishable Fire, 2019, film, colour, sound, 24 min, film still © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, This undreamt of sail is watered by the white wind of the abyss, 2022, installation view, 12th Berlin Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 11.6.–18.9.2022, photo: Jens Franke © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Forgetting Vietnam, 2016, film, colour, sound, 90 min, film still © Moongift Films
Võ An Khánh, Mobile military medical clinic during the period when the enemy is defoliating U Minh Forest, 1970/2022, archival pigment inkjet print, 60 x 60 cm. © Võ An Khánh and Sàn Art
Assemblage 4
designed by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani
Jean Luc Godard, Pierrot le Fou, 1965, film, colour, sound, 110 min, film still © StudioCanal
Lispector, Clarice. The Complete Stories. New York: New Directions, 2015.
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Into The Violet Belly, 2022, film, colour, sound, 20 min, film still © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, This undreamt of sail is watered by the white wind of the abyss, 2022, installation view, 12th Berlin Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 11.6.–18.9.2022, photo: Jens Franke © Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Sergei Parajanov, The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969, film, colour, sound, 78 min, film still © The Criterion Collection
Hong Sang-soo, On the Beach at Night Alone, 2017, film, colour, sound, 101 min, film still © Cinema Guild
