Description

The Sky Is Not Sacred is a single channel video and large triptych painting created in collaboration between Lien Truong and Hồng-Ân Trương. The artists drew from the declassified documents on Operation Popeye, a CIA operation using weather modification as a weapon during the American Southeast Asian military campaign. Planes dropped seeding agent into clouds, initiated rainfall and extended the monsoon season, making vehicular travel impossible over terrain. The large triptych painting transforms the rudimentary cloud diagrams from the declassified documents into a lurid, red landscape. Three ominous clouds take form over a vast landscape, the painting’s hard edges, structure and uncanny color are used to agitate natural observations between sky and water. In the video, footage taken from war planes in the sky during the American military campaign in Việt Nam chronicles the perspectives of fighter pilots, and is juxtaposed with a narrative by John Constable, the 19th century British painter whose keen observations of the sky and clouds established a distinct landscape painting practice. Constable’s text professes an authentic reverence to the sky, suggesting the idealization of nature and science as an aesthetic epistemology. Together, image and text concede in admiration and awe, to the sky’s stature as a sublime, horrifying space. The Sky Is Not Sacred suggests the tension between the aesthetic and the political, and asserts the way in which Western ideologies have violently impacted the Vietnamese landscape, and more broadly, how they have shaped our cultural and emotional relationship to landscape as an imaginary space.