Diane Severin Nguyen’s Transfigurations | Art21 "New York Close Up"

(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 ♪