Exhibit: The Spirit of Invention by Tim Hawkinson

On exhibit until April 14th at Pasadena City College is Tim Hawkinson's Spirit of Invention. It's a short visit, but there are a few noteworthy pieces to consider, primarily his Average Vitruvian Man and Thumbsucker. Admission is free. It's a quick stop but an enjoyable one.

Hawkinson is recognized internationally for his creativity. His approach is to mix "high tech and low tech in unexpected confluence, his resulting artworks are a wonder of creative ingenuity. Because of his remarkable spirit of invention and the wonderfully unpredictable outcomes of his inquisitive postulations."

His 2016 Average Vitruvian Man references the famous Vitruvian Man drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, which was based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry and classical architecture. Here, all the main body parts have been photographed in the round, and averaged into identically sized 8 1/2 x 11” prints wrapped around plastic soda bottles.

Hawkinson's work has been called "a playful dance with life itself." In his 2015 Thumbsucker, we see a moon "formed from enlarged and reduced casts of the artist’s mouth, and the astronaut is formed through casts – also enlarged and reduced – of his thumb and fingers. " 

Pasadena City College notes that "This exhibition of Hawkinson’s work offers a sampling of artworks throughout his career, in hopes that the viewer may witness this ongoing thread of creative genius, this unexpected, serendipitous pairing of high and low that marks Hawkinson’s innovative process of discovery."

Per his bio:
Tim Hawkinson's (b. 1960, San Francisco) idiosyncratic creations are meditations on nature, machines, mortality, the body and human consciousness. Since the 1980s, the artist has used common found and store-bought materials, handcrafted objects, and machines to shift familiar subject matter off-kilter, creating visual conundrums and conceits imbued with deeper meaning. His inventive works range in size from monumental kinetic and sound-producing sculptures to almost microscopic pieces created from such unassuming materials as fingernail clippings and eggshells. Driven by ideas, materials, and an interest in transformation, Hawkinson continues to create unlikely and thought-provoking associations by transforming common materials into works of art. Hawkinson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015.

[Road Trip] Museum of Neon Art, Glendale, CA

Founded in 1981 the Museum of Neon Art is a definite treasure of Southern California. The Museum of Neon Art "encourages learning, curiosity and expression through the preservation, collection and interpretation of neon, electric and kinetic art. Neon is a gateway between scientific principles and artistic expression. Neon illumination integrates electrical technology, creative design, and fundamental concepts of physics and chemistry."

The Museum of Neon Art currently holds the distinction of being the only museum in the world devoted exclusively to art in electric media, exhibiting electric and kinetic fine art, and outstanding examples of historic neon signs, for over 30 years. Which may sound like hyperbole, but I found it to be an apt description.

Presently, their main exhibit is the art of plasma, which I found extremely fascinating. It's on display until July 30th, and well worth the visit no matter what your artistic discipline. There's much to consider with this medium, and I'd love to see how Lao artists might take on such a form even as it would require an engagement with the sciences and the humanities in a way that not all of us have ready access to.

It's been 18 years since the Museum of Neon Art last presented an exhibit on plasma, and director Kim Koga was a wonderful host during my visit recently, putting it all into context.

Here are just a handful of the amazing and wonderful displays I saw:

I particularly appreciated this because we often think of neon art as a very two dimensional affair to appreciate primarily from a single angle, but here the plasma art made a very good case that much of it must be seen from 360 degrees, and the very best pieces allow for tactile engagement, although the general public rarely gets to do so. Private collectors would do well to obtain such wonders.

Presently, the MONA is open only from Thursday to Sunday, typically from noon until 7pm, except for 5pm on Sunday. Admission is typically $10 or $5 if you're a Glendale resident. Children under 12 can come for free. It's located at 216 Brand Street and is near some good restaurants and shopping before or after.

Parking is somewhat tricky because the back lots behind the museum fill up fast, but it is not impossible.  $35 also gets you a year's membership, which I think is more than reasonable to preserve such treasures.

Legacies of War Exhibition: Tinney Contemporary Gallery, February 25 - March 25

This weekend the Legacies of War exhibition by Sisavanh Phouthavong opened up in Tennessee at the Tinney Contempoary Gallery. Sisavanh Phouthavong is one of the first professional Lao American visual artists and educators of her generation. The opening reception will be held on March 4th.

I did a profile on her work previously, having been deeply impressed with her art since I first encountered it several years ago. We recently met face to face for the first time at the National Lao American Writers Summit in San Diego.

This new body of work is inspired by the organization Legacies of War (legaciesofwar.org). Their mission statement: "is to raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War-era bombing in Laos and advocate for the clearance of unexploded bombs, to provide a space for healing the wounds of war, and to create greater hope for a future of peace."

Over 5,400 Lao refugees resettled in Kansas in the aftermath of the Laotian Civil War that ended in 1975. Through her powerful acrylic work, she confronts the challenges of bicultural memory and documentation. She considers notions of the abstract and the concrete for those who must remember both their inner and external histories in a diaspora framed by secrecy and loss. Her work probes what is shared, what is felt, and what must remain deeply personal among the lessons passed on to the next generation as it heals and rebuilds.

The Tinney Contemporary Gallery is located at 237 5th Avenue North, Nashville, Tennessee 37219. They specialize in collectable modern art by established local, regional, national, and international artists. They present a series of rotating exhibitions throughout the year and participate in the First Saturday Art Crawl on the first Saturday of each month.

Road Trip: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

This week we take a look at the storied Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, a collections-based educational and research institution established in 1919 by Henry E. Huntington in Pasadena, California.

Beyond books, the Huntington is home to an amazing and extensive art collection including permanent and rotating displays that make it well worth a visit if you're in the area.

The primary focus of the art collections are 18th and 19th-century European art and 17th to mid-20th-century American art. The gardens are also magnificent to behold and include landscaped gardens, including a Japanese Garden, a Chinese Garden and a Desert Garden. To its credit, I think it's difficult to take it all in in a single day, and it warrants repeat visits to get the most out of it.

This season, among the special exhibits worth catching are Lari Pittman: Mood Books, Real American Places, Becoming America, and the Orbit Pavilion.

Closing on February 20th, Los-Angeles based artist Lari Pittman is known for his exuberant, colorful, and graphically complex works. Huntington visitors can see the artist at his hallucinogenic best in this exhibition.

Six monumental illustrated books, each opening to more than four feet in width, contain 65 paintings by the artist. They draw from a variety of aesthetic traditions, ranging from decorative art and design to advertising and folk art. Combined with Pittman’s brilliant draftsmanship and acidic color, the images advance an astute and acerbic social commentary embedded in narratives rich with real and invented mythologies.

As someone who's worked closely with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, I have an appreciation for books that challenge our sense of what a book might be beyond those intended for the mass market, and this was a provocative exhibition. It closes February 20th.

The poet in me appreciates the dialogue between the poet Walt Whitman and photographer Edward Weston in Real American Places, on display until March 20th.

In 1941, the Limited Editions Book Club approached Weston to collaborate on a deluxe edition of Whitman’s poetry collection, Leaves of Grass. The publisher’s ambitious plan was to capture “the real American faces and the real American places” that defined Whitman’s epic work. Weston eagerly accepted the assignment and set out with his wife, Charis Wilson, on a cross-country trip that yielded a group of images that mark the culmination of an extraordinarily creative period in his career. On the other hand, the book didn't sell that well and the resulting prints became mostly a footnote barely mentioned in Weston's storied career.

Weston's approach appears not to have been a literal interpretation of Leaves of Grass opting to take a broader inspiration of the concept, and though he typically kept extensive notes on what he was taking pictures of, it's difficult to find many references to what seems like it should have been an extraordinary journey. At this point in my life, this resonates with me at many levels as both a photographer and as a poet.

Up until October, 2019, The Fielding Wing's inaugural exhibition, Becoming America showcases more than 200 works from the Fieldings’ collection of 18th- and early 19th-century American art works, including paintings, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, metal, needlework, and other related decorative arts. Meanwhile, the Orbit Pavilion will be up until September this year, and as a speculative poet, I strongly encourage you to visit. The outdoor installation is the brainchild of Dan Goods and David Delgado, visual strategists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who conceived an innovative “soundscape” representing the movement of the International Space Station and 19 Earth satellites.

In their permanent collection, I'd definitely also encourage you to take a look at their Gutenberg Bible, a copy of the Canterbury Tales, and their display on Paradise Lost. 

Their notes on Paradise Lost brought into focus for me that it was written in the aftermath of the English Civil War and resulted in many of the words we continue to use in English today such as "pandemonium," "terrific," "debauchery," and "stunning," and as a work that might well be considered speculative poetry, it makes me wonder what words Lao who've survived our civil war might invent and add to the Lao language and others.

If you want to visit, the hours are typically from 10-5, but it's always closed on Tuesdays. The last ticketed entry time is 4 p.m. The library and art galleries close at 4:30 p.m. and guests are encouraged to begin exiting at this time. The Huntington is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Independence Day. Admission is between $23-25 for adults and students can enter for $19-21 depending on whether it's a weekday or weekend visit.

Art Exhibition: Dark Visions: Mid-Century Macabre 9/16-1/17

Recently at the Norton Simon Museum, they held the exhibition Dark Visions: Mid-Century Macabre in Pasadena, California. Unfortunately I missed this one but one can get a bit of sense of the items exhibited through the five-minute introductory video at Vimeo.

The significant premise of the exhibition was that "Lurking on the fringes of the 20th-century art world was something sinister, something not necessarily identifiable or easy to fit into a specific movement such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art or Minimalism. The exhibition Dark Visions: Mid-Century Macabre looks to mine the dark recesses of the mid-20th century and explore the creations made to exorcise the demons that plagued artists."

The exhibit was composed of assemblage, painting and lithography, with works by Edward Kienholz, Joseph Cornell, Clare Falkenstein and Jess, among others.

The Norton Simon Museum's earliest example was a closed box by Kurt Schwitters, entitled  Lust Murder Box No. 2 from 1920–22, which they felt foresaw the fascination with the macabre among artists in later decades. The title for the piece was based on a damaged plaster figure that once lay in the box and daubed with lipstick to make it look “bloody.”

The question we might ask then is how have our techniques changed in the way we depict the human struggle to engage with morbid subjects such as death and evil in its various, often horrifying forms.

Guillermo del Toro's At Home With Monsters

I'm excited for Minnesota because the Guillermo del Toro exhibition At Home With Monsters is coming in 2017 after it's finished at the LACMA. The wonderful Lao American artist Jo Bangphraxay and I had the chance to to see it and it's taken a while for me to process it all because there were so many inspiring ideas on display. It challenges the way we organizing one's imaginative thoughts into action. The exhibit certainly speaks well to the benefits of collecting over one's lifetime. Per the exhibition introduction:

"Guillermo del Toro (b. 1964) is one of the most inventive filmmakers of his generation. Beginning with Cronos (1993) and continuing through The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hellboy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Pacific Rim (2013), and Crimson Peak (2015), among many other film, television, and book projects, del Toro has reinvented the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Working with a team of craftsmen, artists, and actors—and referencing a wide range of cinematic, pop-culture, and art-historical sources—del Toro recreates the lucid dreams he experienced as a child in Guadalajara, Mexico. He now works internationally, with a cherished home base he calls “Bleak House” in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

Taking inspiration from del Toro’s extraordinary imagination, the exhibition reveals his creative process through his collection of paintings, drawings, maquettes, artifacts, and concept film art. Rather than a traditional chronology or filmography, the exhibition is organized thematically, beginning with visions of death and the afterlife; continuing through explorations of magic, occultism, horror, and monsters; and concluding with representations of innocence and redemption."

There's a visual poetry to the way the Guillermo del Toro has arranged the exhibit, guiding us through five specific but interlocking themes. It's reminiscent of a Cabinet of Curiosities, one with all of the bells and whistles one could have hoped for. It engages you across multiple senses and I applaud that.

We can see the influence of classical artists, as well as more modern voices. At Home With Monsters is arranged in such a way that we can see what's guiding Guillermo del Toro's present work, and what we've gotten away from in horror and the fantastic compared to the early years.

I felt it spoke to the need for an interdisciplinary engagement with speculative art. You can't get the good stuff without reading both highbrow and lowbrow literature, both the classics and pulp material.

You need it all. Visual artwork and sculptures, as well as an appreciation for cinema from the early years to the present. A sense of history, but those things that also have no basis in fact and the empirical. Much of the exhibit also spoke to a sense of Guillermo del Toro being part of a tradition that goes back centuries, and the need for all of us to respect that. Of course there was an extensive homage to Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as Mary Shelly.

A significant amount of attention is given to the exploration of the Frankenstein story, which was fitting considering 2016 was the bicentennial of the dare that led to the creation of this classic horror story. I felt the exhibit gave audiences a thorough opportunity to consider and grapple with the meaning of Frankenstein as a text, as cinema, and in the many other art forms he's been depicted in.

For those of us who are making a sincere study of it, del Toro's presentation is quite thoughtful and I think it pushes us to appraise the possibilities in the tale beyond what we've satisfied ourselves with over the last decade or so. In Frankenstein, we see the intersection between art and science, religion, society, alienation and the quest for meaning. But different art forms can add new subtleties and shades of nuance we can expand upon. Take a look at Frankenstein and consider its thematic and visual influences in Guillermo del Toro's films, for example, such as Pan's Labyrinth or Pacific Rim.

Overall the exhibition has more than enough for the causal enthusiast of not only del Toro's work but science fiction, fantasy, and horror in general.

But the exhibit stands out for its meat for professional artists and writers and I would certainly recommend multiple visits as well as visiting the rest of whatever institution it's shared with because I think it's the rare kind of exhibit that stands alone well, but also helps you view the rest of the standing collection of a museum with a new appreciation. See it if you can!

National Lao American Symposium and Writers Summit comes to Minneapolis

In April, over 100 Lao American scholars, artists and community builders will gather in Minneapolis for the first National Lao American Symposium and Writers Summit to reflect on 40 years of Lao American experiences. The theme is "Our Shared Journey: A Symposium On 40 Years Of The Lao In The United States." This event is led by a partnership with the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center and the Lao American Writers Summit.

Minnesota has the third largest Lao refugee population in the United States after California and Texas. An estimated 12,000 Lao are rebuilding their lives across Minnesota today.

The state has been host to numerous events of historic importance to the Lao American community over the years, including the first National Lao American Writers Summit, the Legacies of War: Refugee Nation Twin Cities exhibit, Little Laos on the Prairie’s Refuge of the InvisibLao exhibit and many others. This year the SatJaDham Lao Literary Project is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

1975 marked the formal end of the Laotian Civil War. The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the pretext of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), recruited and trained irregular paramilitary forces operating within the Royal Lao Armed Forces.

The aerial campaign and carpet-bombing conducted by the United States resulted in more than two million tons of bombs dropped on Laos from 1964 to 1974, making Laos the most bombed country per capita in history. The conflict ultimately led to the displacement over 700,000 refugees around the world, including 400,000 resettled in the United States.

During the course of the Symposium, noted scholars and community builders from across the US will share their perspectives on the Lao journey and how the culture has changed over the years, and what it has preserved.

The keynote speaker is Dr. Phitsamay Sychitkokhong Uy, an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. There will be significant discussions about the power and pitfalls of storytelling and contemporary efforts to tell the Lao American story, particularly in the digital age.

The symposium will be held April 17-18th, 2015 at University of Minnesota’s Urban Research and Outreach Center (UROC) located at 2001 Plymouth Ave North, Minneapolis, MN 55411. It is free and open to the public, but space is limited and participants are asked to register at: http://z.umn.edu/Lao40.

The symposium will include panels, workshops, performances and light food. There will be a public reception on Saturday, April 18th at Co Exhibitions located at 1101 Stinson Blvd NE #2, Minneapolis from 6:00-8:00pm.

CMSI Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts

The Center for Media and Social Impact has recently issued a new "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts" that strives to provide a good, reasonable set of guidelines on the subject.

It can help various exhibitors and other stakeholders answer questions like: "Can an artist use images from Facebook in her collage? Can an art teacher show pictures he took at an exhibition in class? Can a museum put a collection online?"

In this digital age, there can be many questions that emerge. While I'm sure there will be some who object to the interpretations and approaches presented within the code, from what I'm seeing so far, it's mostly guided by common sense. Be sure to give it a look. What are some concerns you have, and where might it be improved?

Cabinet of Ghosts coming to Orange County!

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Arts has announced the upcoming presentation of Cabinet of Ghosts - a group exhibition, curated by Michael EB Detto and Sayon Syprasoeuth, which gathers new work from artists exploring the aftermath of the catastrophe, the genocide, or the war.

"How should we treat memories we leave behind – in real life, as metaphor, as a tool? The very own substantiality each one thing in itself exhibits, its innate properties, its relation to subject, time space, and language are altogether qualities which suddenly start to dissipate when we have to deal with ghosts. It is hard even to agree on one word for them: there are specters, phantoms and wreath, genie and spirit, the apparition and many other denominations to describe a phenomenon that tends to blur the demarcation line between subject and object, past and presence, here and there. Cultural memory is collective memory, and the artist is part of it. Today’s notions of history and memory may be flawed and disputed, but they are especially problematic for the individual that experienced the disaster. It was repeatedly noted: the silence of the victims – when they talk, the suffering will be stretched into the present day, making it unbearable." 

To explore the roles of artists as storytellers and researchers, or as social advocates, artists are invited to talk and present their work. They are the descendants, therefore in a better position to face the past.
 

Initiated by Michael Detto’s project “Cambodian Ghosts”, Sayon Syprasoeuth and Michael Detto invite artists to a dialogue about their art and the ghosts of the past, and to present their work in this context. www.ghostsartproject.net

There will be special opening night performances by Dengue Fever, Amy Kaps and Brutal Blondes, and Prumsodun Ok. The participating artists throughout the exhibition include Amy Kaps & Brutal Blondes, Aragna Ker, Dengue Fever, Ichiro Irie together with Lucas Kazansky, Jayme Odgers, Ken Gonzales-Day, Marianne Magne, Melinda Smith Altshuler, Michael EB Detto, Paula Goldman, Prumsodun Ok, Richard Turner, and Sayon Syprasoeuth.

The reception is Saturday March 7th from 6-10pm while the show runs from March 7-April 18th, 2015. The exhibition will be at 117 N. Sycamore St., Santa Ana, CA 92701.

Terror, wonder and the Lao Gothic?

Prospect Magazine had an article recently on Terror and the Wonder: The Gothic Imagination addressing the recent exhibition at the British Library. This in part reminded me of my disappointment in not having something to turn in to Innsmouth Free Press some time ago for their gothic anthology, and part of a larger set of questions I'd been wondering regarding the composition of a Lao or Lao American Gothic.

In a brief nutshell, the formal Gothic genre is at the moment mostly horror, fiction that incorporates tropes and elements of Romanticism. It's primarily connected to the 19th century and includes the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, and in some surveys, Bram Stoker's Dracula. The stories are often set in abstracted medieval trappings, particularly castles with moody, atmospheric descriptions. Its modern iterations include Southern Gothic and Steampunk Gothic, among other forms. The Shining and The Wicker Man are also often included in discussions of the genre. And of course, the famous painting American Gothic by Grant Wood with all of its imitators and homages.

There's a lot to take away from David Anderson's summation of the exhibit that could be of inspiration to Lao writers. There are certainly more than enough legends that abound to fuel the sense of the brooding dark, the lost heritage entangled among the jungle vines and swamps of the old country, crumbling, mouldering colonial estates, etc.

If we look at the Gothic's ties to Romanticism, we understand that a focus was the sense of authentically experience emotions such as horror and awe while confronting the ancient and the primeval. It was enchanted with the folk arts, medievalism and ancient rites, but also was enamored with spontaneity. In general, it was an aesthetic response to the mechanization and industrialization of society and growth of urban culture. These are things that we can certainly see brought forward in Lao art and literature.

We don't have many examples of Lao art at the present that are really singing the praises of the ban nok lifestyle, getting back to nature and so on. The drive is for modernization and sophistication. We do see significant examples of Lao artists pining wistfully for the old days of the Royal Lao Family or at least, an abstracted idea of Laos as a unified kingdom.

If we take our hint for Lao Gothic from the ways Southern Gothic developed, it would mean developing eccentric characters grappling with a variety of flaws and Lao folk magic, superstition or shamanism. There are plenty of decayed or decrepit settings that have been abandoned that could set the stage.  The Southern Gothic is often focused on sordid poverty and crime, alienation, and what hardscrabble folks do to try and get out of that, even resorting to the sinister and underhanded. We might look to Thavisouk Phrasavath's Nerakhoon for a good model of how that works.

With the vast majority of Lao palm leaf manuscripts and other texts crumbling away, and with it, much of our scant history, and questions of unreliable historians and hagiographers as it is, the Lao literary scene could certainly be open to a gothic treatment. I would hope that writers refrain from casting the Lao hill tribes and other ethnicities in cliched, stereotypical roles that unduly romanticize, villainize or infantilize them, which is absolutely a significant risk in the genre.

But what else might we look for or expect from excellent examples of the Lao Gothic? And what might be the implications for Southeast Asian Gothic as a genre, by extension?

Hmongstory 40 coming in 2015

I recently submitted a number of my older poems for inclusion to the Hmongstory 40 project.

The year 2015 will mark 40 years of the Hmong migration from Laos and Thailand to the United States of America. To commemorate this special anniversary, an exhibition comprising of photographs, stories, fine art, and artifacts will be organized to showcase the Hmong experience.

Hmongstory 40 is a joint effort from many people from throughout the state of California. It represents a collaborative that shares a common vision. This exhibition seeks to provide a rare and intimate opportunity to connect with the Hmong people.

From the past to the present, Hmongstory 40 aims to construct a different narrative that is still absent within the Hmong community and the general public at large. If you get a chance to, be sure to check the exhibit out and the various presentations connected to it next year.

Lao Diaspora Project: Refuge of the InvisibLao Exhibition, January 10- 24, 2015

Little Laos on the Prairie, Laos in the House and the Lao American artist Chantala Kommanivanh have spent the better part of 2014 gathering the oral and visual stories of the Lao community as we prepare to mark 40 years since the beginning of the Lao diaspora.

Those efforts are now culminating in one of the first events in the country in 2015 as a storytelling art and photography exhibit at the Vine Gallery entitled: “Refuge of the InvisibLao: A Visual Essay.”

The exhibit will feature the work of acclaimed neo-expressionist Chicago-based artist Chanthala Kommanivanh and past and present portraits of Lao American journeys that were collected by LLOTP Founding Editor, Chanida Phaengdara Potter, and other special guests.

The event welcomes community members, public officials, advocates, scholars, and those interested in immigrant stories from Laos and Southeast Asia.

They're asking many profound questions during this exhibit:

What is your dream after a tumultuous past? After the Laotian Civil War during the Vietnam War era, thousands of Southeast Asians emigrated to the United States, Australia, France and other countries. Thousands more followed as students, merchants, and to simply start new lives. How have the years changed our sense of who we are, who we have been, and who we can be?

During this time, Little Laos on the Prairie will launch its 2015 #BeLaod campaign to promote historically invisible stories of Lao American journeys in the United States.

Stories of displacement, isolation, identity crisis, reflection, hope and happiness are some of the themes that encompass the depth of the path to an American Dream for the Lao Diaspora.

The opening storytelling reception is Saturday, January 10, 2015 from 5:00pm-8:00pm. Appetizers and drinks will be served. Originals and prints of artwork will be available for sale. All proceeds goes to The Lao Diaspora Project and their collaborators to continue their work.

The exhibition runs January 10-24, 2015. The Vine Arts Center is located at 2637 27th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It's on the secnd level of Ivy Arts Building in the Seward neighborhood.

What would go into Deco Lao?

Over the weekend, I've been giving a bit of thought to what the characteristics of a Deco Lao movement might be. This comes in part from looking at the current trend of many Lao artists, including myself, to look at the ideas the artists and writers of the early 20th century were exploring, where it often feels like we had unfinished conversations. For example, many of our visual artists are looking intensely at the work of Picasso, while I've been regularly looking at what could have been done with pulp fiction.

If we took a cue from Art Deco, we might ask how Lao might address the ideas of the Futurists and the Cubists, or the Constructivists and Modernists, among others. At the heart of Art Deco was a sense that the Machine Age could engage with the motifs of traditional crafts. We could embrace geometry and the ornate in an elegant response to industrialism. Art Deco wasn't afraid of technology and inorganic motifs. In the Internet Age, this is an idea that is still timely.

With Art Deco, we saw humans trying to discuss ways to express and create a visual vocabulary that conveyed opulence and optimism, glamor and luxury, wrapped up with a sense of confidence that humanity would march forward and progress socially and technologically. The possibility of regression was absurd. When the style was criticized, the chief arguments were that it was gaudy, decadent and hedonistic in a time of contraction.

If we were to bring forward a sense of Deco Lao today, the same concerns would likely emerge. What would be an appropriate way for everyday Lao to explore the idea of technology, art, science and the spirit mingling without giving way to crass commercialism and commodification? It's easy to see where some ideologues would find an embrace of Art Deco in conflict with many Lao values regarding modesty and humility, but I don't know if this would be insurmountable.

The Asian Art Museum in Seattle recently had an exhibit looking at the sculpture, painting, prints, ceramics, lacquerware, jewelry, textiles, furniture, and graphic ephemera from the Japanese response to Art Deco. Kendall Brown, professor at CSU-Long Beach, curated the exhibition, which is drawn from the collection of Robert and Mary Levenson who carefully preserved the pieces. These are drawn from approximately 1920-1945, giving us a look at the movement over some 25 years, captured in approximately 200 objects.

I'm intrigued by one of the points Dr. Brown mentions in his interview with Salon: "For the Japanese, even as deco is a European, cosmopolitan, up-to-date, forward-looking style, it’s also a style that connects with, and in a sense utilizes, the Japanese past. It’s familiar and unfamiliar, forward-looking and backward-looking simultaneously for the Japanese."

This is interesting because we could look at the 20th anniversary of the SatJaDham Lao Literary project and see what has been made within a similar range of time. Many would say the SatJaDham Lao Literary project went into decline shortly after 2001 as far as direct overall artistic output went, so the SatJaDham influence is a little nebulous to define today. But I think it was a very important starting point that led to the work of many of the contemporary Lao artists in their early years.

One question I wish we'd explored more as artists over the last 20 years is what the "cultured" Lao household looks like. What objects would we see in such a space in the high society homes, the middle class homes, and even the lower class homes of the Lao community. What are common items, and what are the rare objects that would be highly sought after? Where are our conversations on what a good example of such a piece would include, and what would they exclude?

In planning a Lao arts retrospective, there's an element where we have to ask: What would not have been possible to exhibit back in 1990 for our culture and community? One might easily point to connections between the Lao community and Japan due to heavy anti-Japanese sentiment of the times, and interaction with some governments still remains a touchy subject in many enclaves.

It's important to look at what we fear. Perhaps such displays will reinforce those fears or make them seem quaint. We don't really know yet, because we haven't approached this honestly. How might we confront issues of propaganda, nationalism, colonialism and imperialism as it has cropped up in various form of Lao expression over the decades?

In the Deco Japan exhibit, one of the interesting concepts they explored was the concept of the MOGA, or "modern girl" who listened to jazz, adopted Western-style haircuts, smoked or went to dance halls while doing her makeup in a loud fashion. It doesn't take a big leap of the imagination to see what our modern day counterparts would be in the Lao community, although they've usually been depicted artlessly.

One of the other interesting parts of Dr. Brown's interview in Salon were his remarks that "In the late ’20s/early ’30s, there is a brief florescence — a little cultural moment in Japanese cities that Japanese at the time called “erotic grotesque nonsense.” It’s erotic; it’s a little edgy; it’s strange; and it’s kind of comical. Even with this cosmopolitan international jazz age, there’s growing political repression. Assassinations, laws, Communist Party outlaws, a move towards ultra-nationalism … And sort of as a backlash against that, there’s an erotic, edgy, subversive quality to a lot of art. But at the other end — also appropriate for deco, and showing the style — is this growing ultra-nationalism and even militarism. This real tension of ’30s culture comes through in deco, and this exhibition, we hope."

For a Deco Lao movement, these are ideas that are likely to show up in our own efforts as well. But what other directions might we go? The final answers remain to be seen.