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Graphite pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 9"x12"

I have always thought of darkness as a very seductive force, so it literally grows tongues and lips to kiss you. In this series of drawings, tongues are used as a sensory tool to experience the world. Like snakes flickering their tongues to taste the air, these figures germinate tongues from their bodies to know themselves and the environment around them.

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Photographs, 8"x10"

These photographs are literal translations of the drawings. Tongues grow out of the points of contact in the body. It becomes a perverse way of kissing yourself.

Reenactment is a physical, mental, and emotional engagement with the historical past. It is predicated on the use of the body to transport the participant into another time period, and ultimately using the body as a vessel to bring the past into the present. In relation to other forms of historical or academic study, reenactment in many ways offers a deeper dimension by presenting history in an entertaining form, promising a sense of personal transformation for the participant, and allowing the observer to tangibly interact with the past.

Instead of viewing reenactment as accurate forms of "living history", the process should be seen as a relative experience of personal transformation. Reenactment is as much about erasure of the past as it is about memorializing it. The reenactment act incorporates a mixture of fact and fantasy. In many ways, war movies are the greatest form of reenactment. Hollywood's painstaking attempts to maintain historical accuracy confirm these war films as a grand form of remembering history. Actors must undergo a rigorous physical and mental process to portray their characters, in the same way reenactors psychologically and physically strain themselves to attain a "genuine" historical experience.

I decided to use the films Apocalypse Now and Platoon because Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen starred in the two films respectively. This patriarchal relationship between the two films in many ways metaphorically represent the generational relationships in war movies and the military. For example, Vietnam era soldiers were inspired by movie stars such as John Wayne; and they went into war carrying the idealisms of World War II. The cycle continues today as this generation of soldiers are inspired by characters and films about Vietnam. The reason why I chose to work with popular culture representations rather than actual documentary footage is because for my generation, young Americans learn history through second hand sources such as these cultural adaptions of history. From the very beginning, there is already a blur between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality.

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Photographs, 8"x10"

As I reviewed the films Apocalypse Now and Platoon, I made visual notes about history in relation to the films directly on the television screen and photographed the resulting image. I made these notes as visual exercises to begin thinking about the reenactment process.

In the first row, the hands are inserted to metaphorically hide certain parts of history. For instance, war films and history have a tendency to simplify deaths on both sides. Films tend to glorify war-related deaths as heroic, portraying it in a glossy and stylized manner. One of the photographs deal with American war technology. Napalm became a sign of American technological extravagance in the Vietnam War. The destruction that this form of attack caused tends to be glossed over in the act of remembering history. In some instances, the hand tries to deny deaths that inevitably occur in the fog of war. In the second row, the hand becomes an ambiguous shadow that acts like an omnipotent presence in the films. The form attempts to control the action unraveling in the movie. Sometimes it amusingly tries to grab military aircrafts out of the sky; in other occasions it struggles to prevent a heinous act from happening.

In the third row, a red entity is inserted into the film to highlight certain aspects of the action. For example, the red form is placed over a Viet Cong soldier and Willem Dafoe's character in Platoon to make them into targets. In other cases, the red presence becomes a sexual signifier or an ominous symbol. Someone mentioned that the red circle simulates a bullet hole shot into the movie, as if the film itself is bleeding.

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Photographs, 8" x 10"

I began to experiment with the idea of reenactment being a form of possession and a confrontation with ghosts from the past. In a reenactor's attempt to re-animate the past, the actors must take on another character from a specific time period. The process imitates a form of possession; and the endeavors to establish a dialogue with the past echo a seance ritual.

In this series of photographic exercises, I emphasized the supernatural aspect of the reenactment process to the extreme. Often taking a humorous turn, a figure donning a camouflage uniform acts as a medium or shaman to communicate with characters from the film. The "medium" begins the process by literally becoming the character in the film; the figure uses the actual film-still as a mask. The film characters manifest themselves as ghostly entities or ectoplasms, recalling late 19th century photographers' experimentation with the supernatural.

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Photographs, 8"x10"

In this series, the characters from the movies become a physical landscape. The word "Vietnam" is a pure American invention. On maps, the country is known as "Viet Nam". "Vietnam" becomes a fictional landscape that Hollywood and popular culture created in their attempts to memorialize America's longest and bloodiest military engagement. In these photographs, the movies and the characters constructed by them literally produce a new terrain, a Vietnam of the mind.

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Photographs, 11"x14"

These images are preliminary storyboards of the final product. All these exercises are leading up to a series of video segments about reenactment and history. The moments that I chose are specific instances that have influenced my ideas about war, violence, and death. I intend to create a shaman character who will physically enter the films and interact with the characters. Sometimes the medium will become the characters in the movie and imitate their actions; at other times the shaman will attempt to stop an act from happening. Themes of control, violence, loss, mourning,and witnessing will be explored through these segments.

Full wall presentation of reenactment exercises.

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Gouache on paper

These drawings act as diagrams for the performances. Some of the performative acts are attempts in literal translations of the drawings.

Art and camouflage (respectively): "The one makes something unreal recognizable; the other makes something real unrecognizable."

-Hugh B. Cott

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Photographs, 8 x 10

Click here to view clip (1.4 MB, Quicktime)

In this humorous and perverse experiment, an "invisible" or disembodied figure grows a tongue from the hand and starts making out with itself.

Click here to view first clip (2 MB, Quicktime)

Click here to view second clip (loop, 4.6 MB, Quicktime)

The video is intended to be projected in a corner and looped to play forever. The second clip is the final product. The first clip illustrates the process of the performative act.

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These are views of drawing and sculpture installations. Many of the objects were inspired by my camouflage drawings. It consists of work from other sections of this site. These pictures show how some of the work are suppose to be presented. In installation views 1-7, my intention was to set up a shrine; further exploring my ideas of the relationship between the military and ritualistic religions.

I made a series of eleven dolls based on the drawing series "Camouflage: Rebirth". Installation views 8-15 show the dolls along with the drawings.

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I usually do these studies before I execute my photographs and drawings. The images eventually took on a life of its own. Some are digital manipulations, and some are physical erasures of magazine images. In many instances, the erased features and body parts take on a shroud like appearance, resembling ghost forms.

 

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Photographs, 20" x 24"

"An Army of One" is a photographic narrative that examines the commonalities between the act of soldiering and Buddhism. The discipline required to complete each journey reveals many similarities between such contradictory forces. I was interested in the monastic nature of the army, and at the same time the violent process of extricating the ego from the self in Buddhism. For example, as a soldier one must sacrifice oneself for duty and others. Army values such as "selfless service", "respect", and "personal courage" are very similar to Buddhist ideals of oneness, eliminating the ego, and respect for others. Ultimately, it is a personal narrative where I explore the relationship between two very conflicting ideas.