Spring Snow

Since a voice can’t be pictured, picture a jungle. Sound resonating above ground, pulsing beneath leaves. High-pitched and “feminine”, her words issued like warnings or friendly advice, troubled between ally and foe. It’s a very good idea to leave a sinking ship. They will give you a medal, but only after you are dead [...] poor soldier. Trịnh Thị Ngọ – aka Hanoi Hannah – was a Vietnamese broadcaster for the Communist-run radio Voice of Vietnam, whose English-spoken recordings were directed at US troops during the Vietnam War, with the aim of sparking sympathy, discouragement, and homesickness in the GIs she addressed. Her bulletins were issued three times a day and transmitted via shortwave deep into the country’s southern combat zones, remote outposts and jungle areas where soldiers were patrolling. Hanoi Hannah also went by the alias Thu Hương, an on-air pseudonym which translates to “autumn fragrance”. Titled with its own seasonal poetics, Diane Severin Nguyen’s Spring Snow places us in front of another jungle, electrified by radio static, but this time voiceless. It’s springtime again and the snow has started to fall. Leaves are covered in particles, at once eerie and invasive, softly dystopian; something seems to be haunting this improbable landscape. Upon our latest discussion, Diane mentions Hanoi Hannah, the radio’s magnetic silence, psychological warfare and the strategy consisting in summoning your oppressor’s sympathy – “a plasticity that is so important to some kind of political apparatus” she later writes to me. Suspiciously fleshly and photogenic, Nguyen’s images work through a distorted familiarity, objects we think we sympathize with but are not quite able to recognize. Her still lives resist identification, language’s tendency to pin down and define. They rather summon hermeneutic adrenaline, a high for imagination feeding descriptive kink. Let us then look at a few of them: an embrace, an injury, a crush – all shape the encounter with their respective frequencies. Diane Severin Nguyen crafts a visual grammar of things affecting one another. Matters collide, aestheticized and sometimes injured, a bow adorning a cushion with the weight of an anvil: a decorative impact. Some layer one another, others draw from metonymy: the “teasing periphery [...] of a collar, the gleaming edge of a sleeve”1 pointing back to an absent body; a ribbon in which the artist sees the strip of a flag – “since that’s all a ribbon can ever be”, Diane tells me. All elements cohabitate under a chemical snow, a sensuous and perhaps poisonous decay, somewhere between the sartorial and the edible – a cake-like decorum playing with kitchen semiotics, following the artist’s tendency of repurposing gestures ascribed to “femininity”: baking, make-up etc. the snow or sugar here acting as contour to enhance all features. Nguyen avoids photography’s tendency to flatten. Her images are not involved in translating what is, but what may be. “We like a touch of kitsch to enhance the clear lines of the possible” 2 writes Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, and something of this phantasmic potentiality comes up with every frame. They almost “make our eyes circle burn [...] [standing] at the tip of the eyelash, shining with glassy liquid” 3 to quote how Iris – the protagonist of Nguyen’s previous film In Her Time (2024) – describes the effect of her tears. From the common substance of a cry and a picture, Diane Severin Nguyen draws an approach to photography as liquid language, one enabling exchange of value and shifts in scale. Her pieces negotiate antagonistic concepts and power relations: innocent and poisonous, victim and perpetrator, enemies to lovers. Yet at the center of the ground floor rests another separation: a fracture in the form of a split screen, the two frames placed side by side sharing no apparent setting or horizon – all common threads to be inferred by the viewer. Images take on the risk of semantic contamination, informing one another with a clue-like subtlety or the syntax of mix & match. On our left sits this luscious jungle, too pristine to be true, a puppeteered naturality “dressed up” in ecocidal confetti that points to its neighboring image: a succession of Hanoi-fetched girlhood outfits, bearing the trace of wear & tear and of preppy US fashion – pleated miniskirts, bows, ties and an Ivy league sweatshirt whose varsity font appears again beneath the jungle, listing dates like karaoke lyrics. Days and months pop up according to an internal logic whose non-linearity is further enhanced by the video’s looping mechanism and the garments’ rotative device. Half-way between runway and roundabout, borrowing from both pageantry and parade, these bodiless silhouettes “hold the trace of lives both staged and undone” 4. There's something authoritarian to the way they’re first shown on screen, recalling some of the titles’ bellicose subtext [Victory, Wartime Spark]; a martial rhythm heightened by theatrical lighting whose tempo later goes wild, speeding up or decelerating to the different tunes until saturating to white noise – as if hacked by some sort of ghost in the machine. At once premature and rebellious, the clothes invade the screen with troubled agency, staging something akin to the “paradoxical doubleness” scholar Sianne Ngai perceives in “the cute”: the possibility for being “helpless and aggressive at the same time”. It’s as if they were animated by some sort of teenage angst, unleashed to the stroboscopic light of the next-door jungle – one squirting snowflakes in a subtle echo to the virginal draping of the room. “We need dignity and texture and fountains. [...] The most pleasing civic object would be erotic hope”5 writes again Robertson. Diane Severin Nguyen layers the space, enhancing and unsettling its whiteness through matrimonial fabric. Purity exists only insofar as it is synthetic. 1 Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman. New York, Oxford University Press, p.35. 2 Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Toronto, Coach House Books, 2003, p.60 3 Diane Severin Nguyen, In Her Time (Iris’s Version). video installation, 2024, 67 minutes. 4 Excerpt from Diane Severin Nguyen’s text for her recent open studio at VAC, Hanoi. 5 Lisa Robertson, op. cit. House Books, 2003, p.69