The Propeller Group brings a phantasmagorical Vietnam to James Cohan

VOV.VN -The New York Times recently published an article by Frank Rose about an artist collective that addresses the mingled destinies of the US and Vietnam.

From left, the members of the Propeller Group — Matt Lucero, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Phunam Thuc Ha — with a prop from their “History of the Future” project (2012)

The group has three members — Phunam Thuc Ha, 41, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 40, both born in Saigon, and Matt Lucero, 40, born in Southern California — are children of the war that raged there until 1975.

They lived in different family circumstances. Mr. Lucero’s father was a mechanic and helicopter gunman in the United States Army who found himself doing grisly cleanup in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet offensive. Mr. Ha’s father, a cameraman for the CBS News correspondent Morley Safer, got himself and his family out as the war was ending. Mr. Nguyen’s family left Vietnam in 1978 and settled in Oklahoma, sponsored by a church there.

The article also wrote about how Propeller Group members embarked upon a video production partnership and their collaboration on some projects.

After coming back to Vietnam, Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Ha formed a video production partnership. One of their first jobs was a collaboration with the artist Dinh Q. Le on a 2006 work, “The Farmers and the Helicopters,” which involved a farmer and a mechanic who had become so obsessed with helicopters after the war that they cobbled one together out of agricultural equipment parts.

Mr. Lucero, who had attended the California Institute of the Arts with Mr. Nguyen, went to Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) to work with them on a later project and decided to stay.

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