Plaster cast of artist's arm, motor, electronics, aluminum, white sheer curtain, staged unidirectional lighting.

Description

In the installation The Study, a single object, Where is Hieu?, sits in the corner of an empty room that is separated from the outside world by a sheer curtain that lets in just enough light to turn what would otherwise be a sterile environment into a place for meditation and reflection. The installation feels like a private world – a room of one’s own, filled with quietude until the sculpture begins to move. Like a self-portrait, Where is Hieu? marks a turning point in his artistic career. The work was first realised in a rudimentary form in 2017 when, as a sophomore at university, Phạm Minh Hiếu was torn between his passion for both engineering and art. This piece reflects his internal conflict at the time and, as an embodiment of both fields, shows his early inclination toward this kind of multidisciplinary practice.

Featuring a detailed plaster cast of the artist’s arm that captures the wrinkles and folds of skin, and located atop a mechatronic structure, this work tracks Phạm Minh Hiếu’s movements in real-time – the delicate index finger continuously pointing towards his current location in the world. The artist’s GPS location is transmitted via the internet to a program in the mechatronic structure, which interprets his position and, through a combination of computation and engineering, translates this into a planar rotation of the arm. One interesting idiosyncrasy of the technology is that the closer the artist is to the object, the less accurate the arm becomes. In the proximity of the installation, that computational program is unable to distinguish the precise position of the artist in relation to the object. For the artist this is a feature of the autonomy of the work, not a bug. The closer he gets to himself, the more confusion is generated while the further away he is, a certain clarity is established.

Source: Galerie Quynh.