(machinery beeping)
(beads rustling)
- For me, photography is a very intimate
and one-on-one encounter.
(gentle instrumental music)
Certain materials are understood
very differently through the camera.
I think it's amazing when something can be
really transfigured through the lens.
I make photographs and videos and
also have installation elements,
what I would call architectural interventions.
(instrumental music continues)
Photographs are such intense condensations.
They're almost like a dreamwork.
(people cheering)
That YouTube, internet space, it gives me ideas
to make me feel connected to other people
who are also trying to make things.
(gentle electronic music)
I love watching craft videos, fruit carvings,
cooking tutorials, makeup tutorials, braiding hair.
These crafts and acts of making
have a real temporality to them,
almost like an expiration date.
Photography deals so well with the impermanent
because you can just make an image
of a very impermanent situation.
(dramatic music)
As a photographer, I feel like it's my imperative
that I have to take in all of the trash, you know,
of the world and I think I work from this psychic garbage.
I work with so many discarded materials,
things that have very little social value ascribed to them.
I'll be cleaning my house and sweep up a pile of dust
and I'll take that dust and I'll just bring it
to the studio in a bag.
Or maybe I take something that has social value
and I turn it back into materiality.
A successful image happens right before
everything falls apart and that could be
because I'm lighting something on fire
and I only have one split second.
(funky music)
I'm touching things and arranging things,
but it all has to happen within one instantaneous moment.
(funky music continues)
(upbeat whimsical music)
Sounds that you can't hear and air that you can't feel
and all the factors that you can't experience
shape what the photograph ends up becoming.
(beads rustling)
By the time I'm finished with an image,
I don't even remember where I started.
(beads clinking)
It's actually a process that's an
accumulation of failures in my studio.
It's very improvisational.
I almost think of it as a performance I am doing alone.
(orchestral music soaring)
(water tinkling)
I try to work against that impulse to identify
and get more towards a place of feeling.
I think knowing can create a distance.
Growing up and seeing the way that my mom
interacted with physical things in America,
where so oftentimes in the wrong way,
in the way that she would pack my launch,
a sauce in saran wrap, chips in saran wrap.
I came home to visit my mom and she was out in the garden
and she was just stabbing fake flowers into the ground,
amongst real flowers.
It was just like why would you do that?
Why do you want fake flowers?
To her, there's no difference.
There are the fake flowers and the real flowers
filling up the yard and making it look vibrant.
Seeing her do that, combine the natural and the artificial
for the sake of this cohesive image,
I felt so much relation to that in my work.
There's something about hidden labor
that actually imbues a psychic charge to an object.
I'm interested in these divides in culture.
What's trashy and what's seen as intellectual and clean?
I really relate to that space of copying,
wanting to be this other thing and stepping into that role.
And I love karaoke.
When you're singing karaoke with your friends,
the lyrics all of the sudden take on
this totally different meaning.
It brings out the text of the original material.
♪ And the vision that was planted in my brain ♪
♪ Still remains ♪
♪ Within the sound ♪ - "The Sound of Silence"
was written to provoke Western liberal American sympathy.
The Vietnamese subject was always
very peripheral to that sympathy.
With "Tyrant Star," I was just looking
for the perfect war song
and I ended up picking this peace anthem.
I worked with this girl, I found her on YouTube.
She was kind of like the aspiring star of "Tyrant Star."
She can't speak English, I taught her every syllable
of "The Sound of Silence."
A lot of the sounds in this song
are helicopters used during the Vietnam War.
I could take these sounds that were
coming from a very violent place
and then shift them into a pop song.
I really like cover songs 'cause it takes this given reality
that you know and understand
and you can completely twist the affect
on that given reality based on who's singing it and how.
Just the act of having someone Vietnamese sing this song
was powerful, even for me to hear her sing it.
(somber music)
There's something about being an artist
that comes from an inability to just be.
The moment that you speak or communicate,
there's already mediation.
There's something that's about intimacy
that is actually more important than knowing
and I wonder all the time what actually
makes you closer to something.
(Singing to The Sound of Silence) ♪ Hello darkness my old friend ♪
♪ I've come to talk to you again ♪
♪ Ten thousand people, maybe more ♪
♪ Because a vision softly creeping ♪ ♪ People talking without speaking ♪
♪ People hearing without listening ♪
♪ People writing songs ♪
♪ No one dared ♪
♪ Disturb the sound of silence ♪