VietNamNet Bridge – ‘Voracious Embrace: The Human / Animal Interface’ solo installation exhibition by Lena Bui on Thursday opened at HCMC Fine Arts Museum, bringing visitors to the hidden, perhaps overlooked encounters, between the human and animal world.

Over the last nine months, Lena Bui has been working with the scientists of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in HCMC, as an ‘artist-in-residence’, to learn more of their research and methods of working, including the dilemmas they face in the world of crisis ‘control and prevention’.

Attracted by zoonoses - diseases such as influenza which pass to humans from animals - and the relationship between the consumption of animal parts and the conditions they are bred, butchered and packaged in, Bui traveled to rural farming areas such as Can Gio and Trieu Khuc Village then compelled by what she witnessed. Large abstract drawings resembling bodily forms, flesh and skin – a representation of elements found in wet markets across Vietnam – became a recurring motif on the studio wall.

These works, coupled with another series of drawings depicting the chaotic yet fluid and strangely beautiful swarms of movement found in the invisible microscopic world of bacteria, help to provide both a micro and macro view of how complicated and seemingly automatic our interactions are. What was particularly intriguing for Bui was the farmer’s intimacy with their animals and the lack of fear towards interacting with blood, raw flesh, feathers, skin and bones, under conditions most urban dwellers would consider unhygienic. Bui found the presence of highly effective traditional farming practices, evidence of a natural relation between the growths of the crop, the herding of animals and their consumption.

Documenting her fieldwork through video, photography, sound and sketch, Bui was determined to experiment with differing media, desiring a weight and viscerality that reflected the reality of what she had witnessed. Here was a world seemingly unaffected by the scientific knowledge of the microscopic potential dangers inherent to living in close proximity with animals – an existence that nonetheless forms the backbone of a crucial part of the
human food chain in Vietnam today.

The show runs till November 14 at the museum, 97A Pho Duc Chinh Street in HCMC’s District 1.

VietNamNet/SGT