CHICAGO, IL.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the first US exhibition of The Propeller Group, an artist collective based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, who came together from a shared interest in globalized street culture and a background in filmmaking. Working in innovative ways, The Propeller Group’s three members—Matt Lucero, Phunam, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen—delve into the material culture of Vietnam while adapting the visual forms of international popular culture. The Propeller Group is on view from June 4 to November 13, 2016, and is organized by MCA Curator Naomi Beckwith.
The Propeller Group’s exhibition is the first in the MCA’s ‘Ascendant Artist’ series to feature both a collective and artists working in Asia. The show presents seven multi-part projects, comprised of related videos and objects from the past five years. Their ambitious and irreverent projects are frequently anchored in Vietnam’s history or its current dynamics as a growing capitalist market, and extend to address global phenomena, including international commerce, the tools of war, and shared traditions across cultures.
Their work reflects the developing commercial market in Vietnam and, at the same time, is attuned to the politics of images and the exchange of culture across geography and time. This is exemplified by The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music, a film that weaves together funerary traditions from Ho Chi Minh City and New Orleans. Fade In tracks the fake antiques trade in Vietnam, while other recent works scrutinize the histories of specific weapons.
The two-channel video project, The Guerillas of Cu Chi, documents a war commemoration site in southern Vietnam and the tourist behavior there. Another project, Two Bullets / The AK47 vs. The M16, preserves, in a special gel medium, the bullet collisions between the two guns that were most active in the Vietnam War (the AK used by the Vietnamese and the M16 by US forces). Their new feature-length film, AK47 – The M16 The Film, is a montage of film clips where the two guns are used.
The Propeller Group was established in 2006 by Phunam (b. 1974, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Ho Chi Minh City), and Matt Lucero (b. 1976, Upland, California) and is based in Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles. The Propeller Group art collective positions themselves between a media production company and archaeologists of hidden historical conundrums. Awards include the 2015 Internationale Kurztfilmtage Wintherthur and a Creative Capital award for their video project Television Commercial for Communism. The collective has been featured in numerous international exhibitions including the The Ungovernables (2012 New Museum Triennial), Made In LA (2012 Los Angeles Biennial), Propsect 3 (New Orleans Triennial 2014), and the Venice Biennale 2015. The Propeller Group has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sàn Art and Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong.
