Changing Identity art exhibit @ Mills College

On July 11th, a group of us went to see the Changing Identity art exhibitation/installation at Mills College's Art Museum. It was an extraordinary experience in that I did not quite know how to interpret or understand the evening. There were 50 installations that made up the exhibition, and they were pieces contributed by 10 different Vietnamese female artists. Two live in the U.S. and 8 others live in Viet Nam. The highligted installation that evening was presented by artist Ly Hoang Ly who was visiting from Vietnam, and who also provided us with an art performance for her installation. (One of the grants that traveling exhibition received allowed it to bring one artist to each location. They take turns and this time was Ly's opportunity to perform and talk about her art work and installation.)

I can only describe some of the things that happened in Ly Hoang Ly's art performance, and even now am still figuring out how to interpret the performance.


The installation took up quite a portion of the larger exhibition. One entire wall was painted red. Women's feminine/maxi pads, unwrapped and exposed were stuck to the wall in a regular pattern, creating a white against red patchwork type of design. On the floor was a circular pattern of maxi pads, still wrapped in their pink plastic wrap, arranged in a swirl design, reminiscent of the meditative labyrinth or of the Buddhist karmic circles, or just the cycles of life and death.


During one part of the interactive performance, Ly invited the audience to step up to the circle and unwrap a maxi, then to stick it to the floor. From what I could see, the majority of the people in the audience participated. Later, she taped maxi pads onto her chest and back, and invited people to put their mark on her with red paint.


Part of Ly's performance included a number of props, two of which were the woven bamboo baskets that Vietnamese women often use to do their daily housework (such as sorting grains and carrying groceries from the market), and the two things that Buddhist monks use for meditation (they are used to "tung kinh" in Buddhism).

The performance asked us to think about the boundaries of public vs. private in the lives of Vietnamese women; about rites and rituals and how they are used in various ways to define and subjugate women into certain positions of submission, subserviance; about the systematization of unequal gender rights; about the multiplicity of women's identities and roles in Southeast Asian cultures in general and in Vietnam in particular.