Perpetual Paintings
In 2021, a flood in New York destroyed the majority of my artworks and personal archives that were in storage there. This event resembled the time my parents left Vietnam at the end of the war, where fate makes the choice. They took some documents, a handful of photographs, and left everything else behind. Just like that, their small chapter and mine were whited out in the blink of an eye.
This destruction had me rethinking the material quality of art, and wondering whether there was a better way that art could survive. The series Perpetual Paintings is a result of this inquiry. Even if the title implies that the works are paintings, they are in fact not limited to any particular medium and may be outputted additionally as photographs, sculptures, etc.
Each work begans as a digital still-life whose objects and items are taken from the Google 3D Warehouse, an open-source library where one can download files of anything and everything rendered in 3D. For example, if an architect wanted to outfit their house with some Scandinavian furniture, they could easily download almost any IKEA couch or bookshelf that others have rendered and uploaded over the years. Using a CAD application like SketchUp, they could place the furniture in a digital 3d space then situate it in different areas, change its colors, scale --- everything. There are now literally millions of objects available for free in this library.
The objects visible in these paintings were selected using specific and random search terms, from the awkward to the ridiculous, such as "sleeping cat", "Vietnam War", "dictator", "bomb", "banh mi" and so on. As painters do, these items were re-assembled into a new still-life arrangement, digitally.
From the files created in SketchUp, a single angle is chosen to output. In the case of a painting, I either paint it myself or outsource to a painting studio (when in Saigon). I even ask the painters to sign my name on the back. The work can also be printed as a photograph. In all cases it is treated as an "original".
The idea of reproducibility is essential. I can make these paintings over and over again, even without me, from the digital file that I then make available in the 3D Warehouse library. I am asserting that the material painting is no more important than its digital counterpart. In fact, in the digital representation, one can view the painting from infinite angles and many more perspectives that are not possible in the IRL version. In this way, the digital artwork is richer, fuller, and may even garner more relevance.
Perpetual Paintings also questions the notion of rarity. Fine art photographs are regularly produced in a limited edition. This is a blatant western, capitalist construct, where creating low supply hopefully increases demand, and certainly raises the price. Yet photography was intended to be accessible and reproducible over and over, with the same inks and papers, à la the printing press and Epson. The idea of a limited edition goes against the inherent nature of the medium, in fact. Estates of photographers like Man Ray and Diane Arbus regularly put out prints long after the artists have passed away and authenticate it with the common “estate stamp”, signifying them as “originals” – whatever that means. In my case, the living and posthumous estates are one and the same. Thus the idea of attribution is also reframed in these works.
In Vietnam, where an artist copying his own paintings is not out of the ordinary, one might ask more broadly why this practice hasn't infiltrated western practices. Perpetual Paintings operates as an open edition by which anyone can download and output/outsource the same work over and over, as painting or photograph, except with limitless variations if so desired. Hence, Perpetual Paintings.