Hien Nguyen

Sculpture 1 Assignment: Color

Title: Death in Red and White

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This sculpture was made in February 2018 to talk about color. This plays into cultural significance (thus history) and differences of the colors red and white between Vietnamese and Western(American) culture.

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In Vietnamese cultures, red is a color of joy and life that is often worn at weddings, lunar new year or other celebrations---and usually adorned with traditional Vietnamese headdresses such as the one I made for the scene (called Khan Dong). White, on the other hand, is a color of death, usually seen at funerals, where people, especially family members, wear white clothed headbands.

 

In the western cannon of references, red also has a connotation of blood and violence, and white generally stood for purity and is worn at weddings. 

 

Here I try to navigate the differences of two colors between the 2 cultures in relations and context of the bloody history of American imperialism and the violence in Vietnam---I try to reference the Tet offensive, an bloody event that took place during the Vietnamese lunar new year, where Tet is an event that Vietnamese people would have adorned such a headdress---but the red that would have been there is because of blood. Behind the headdress are slits of blood from the wall, meant to reference bullet holes. The headdress gave birth to death instead of life---and the white headbands that made up the grave were for mourning the dead.