The addition of rice grains amid the briquettes on the floor suggests the froth of surf breaking along a shore, emphasizing the liminality of the edge of the work as it terminates on the floor plane. Each unit of rice grain or charcoal briquette can function as a module within a larger ensemble. My indoor installations portray passages of time. The gradual process of accumulating dried and discarded materials is an important step in my piece. The time involved in installing a piece presents another dimension.
Time becomes a recorder of an event or a performance.
Placed singly or small clusters, the tomato-filled plastic spheres suggest blood cells, synecdoche for persons alone and in groups. 19 Installed here outside the gallery, the separateness of the spheres filled with dried tomato fragments doubles the separation of persons with AIDS from society, the social construction of an alterity, an alien-ating. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's artworks are evidence that the personal and the societal are not mutually exclusive, and that the gallery space, situated within but apart from the whole of which it is a part mirroring the whole, remains a site for addressing the concerns common to both the self and the society. Biographical Note Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba studied at Brookhaven College, subsequently receiving the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Master of Fine Arts degree from Maryland Institute, College of Art. Like the Roman genius loci , the agathoi daimon takes the form of a snake as embodiment of numen , being the spirit or power attributed as indwelling in a natural place of thing.