Ho Chi Minh City
Jade Mai | Nick Chan
“The central idea is to uncover the hidden relationships between everyday elements in Ho Chi Minh City. I spent the first few weeks feeling the city with all my senses: walking around, talking to people, and connecting the dots.”
“If you trace your steps back as a being through time, gazing at big events in times of change, a pattern will emerge. That pattern is a fractal within a fractal within a carrot within a chariot… this film is about stepping onto it with abandon…”
Behind the Scenes
Fractal Diversity
Jade Mai (Mai Ngoc Bich)
Jade Mai is a Vietnamese visual artist whose mind is constantly seeking to explore the dream-like edges of the human psyche and what lies beyond. With strong cultural references drawn from her Vietnamese roots, her work explores polarities of identity, progress and displacement, and has been showcased at DesignStage at MAD Museum of Art & Design in Singapore, and sold at YellowKorner galleries all around the world.Nick Chan
Nick Chan is an award-winning and accomplished media artist, with a background in music composition and sound design. As a musician, he has released numerous albums within contemporary and electronic genres. As a record producer, he was instrumental in birthing the sonic visions of others. He has been involved in various multi-disciplinary projects, from art exhibition soundtracks, to pataphysical sonic installations utilising stochastic processes.These often result in sound playing an interstitial role, perturbing the synergy between the visual and tactile. His current artistic focus explores the primacy of sound and its polymorphous use as a relational object, outside established notions of musical form.
He has been the Asian regional winner of Lenovo/MTV’s Project CO:LAB, and his sonic installations have been exhibited at Transmission@Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok and Musicity by the British Council in Singapore.
CONCEPT
Fractal Diversity is an audio-visual work seeking to create meaning by highlighting the hidden relationships between everyday structures and objects in Ho Chi Minh City. This will occur across various scales of urban geography represented through the medium of video and sound design.A fractal is a never-ending pattern that is self-similar across different scales, with each small part having the same character as the evolving whole. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals represent relationships of ongoing Creativity borne out of Chaos.
Ho Chi Minh City is a living and breathing whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Can this organic entity speak its own language? And if so, what would this language of hidden symmetry look and sound like? What feelings and thoughts would it elicit?
