‘Thơ Gạo Gió’: A POEM THAT SCRAPES AWAY THE WIND (Finalist Bowness Photography Competition 2024 and Finalist Paul Guest Drawing Competition 2024)

Gạo Gió in Vietnamese means to scrape away the wind.

Practiced throughout China, Indonesia and Vietnam, the traditional treatment uses a spoon or coin to scrape the back and shoulders with a liniment to bruise the capillaries under the skin. Bruising the skin in this way to draw out superficial capillaries, the practice expels a cold that might have struck you down.

The framing of this work references the French Neo-classical paintings of Jean-Aguste-Dominique Ingres; namely ‘The Turkish Bath’ and ‘La Grande Baigneuse.’ This reminds the viewer of how ethnographic and documentary photography owes a great debt to Ingres’ Orientalism. The trope of the erotic bath house when framing the ‘ethnic other’ betrays the colonial fetishisation of what it most fears and desires.

Tourists and expats to this day still associate the unbearably hot and humid equatorial colonies with Tropical Neurasthenia; a psycho-physiological neurosis and sexual malaise that accompanies life in the colonised tropics. Perceiving the people living in these regions as strange and grotesque, it is not surprising that the most circulated images of the Vietnam war appear like a fever dream of naked children drenched in napalm and monks burning into the streets.

‘Thơ Gạo Gió’ subverts Ingres’ gaze. Instead, this is an intimate family portrait. With the artists’ Aunty Nguyen Thị Kim Nhung doing traditional medicine to treat his mum’s fever. Beyond warding off Ingres’ creepy gaze, Kim Nhung scrapes a single word poem on her sister’s back. The word ‘MÁT’ not only means ‘crazy/unhinged’ but also means ‘a cool and welcome relief.’ The women in this portrait etch their rejection of how various men in the family (and much of the Vietnamese community in Australia) often dismiss their artistic work as poetry. The community regularly call these women unhinged ~ ‘MÁT.’ Finding company the treatments of the women in the family, the artist not only learns that Tropical Neurasthenia is a racist construct, but highlights how misogyny in the Vietnamese diaspora often blames their nightmares and traumas on crazy women; whilst desperately seeking approval from the oriental fetishisation of the colonial state.

The terms ‘ĐIÊN’ and ‘LOẠN’ similarly allude to craziness and also reference the radical Modernist and anti-traditional poetry of Hàn Mặc Tử.