I went to the Sculpture Center, which is located on Purves Street in Long Island City, Queens, to experiment with the experimental video by Diane Severin Nguyen. When I was finding out information about this place, their website said I had to make a reservation, which made me think it was probably going to be crowded. But there were only a few visitors when I got there.

           

I sat down in the middle of the floor on a red carpet to watch this experimental video. When they said this was an experimental video, I thought it would be all about the visuals, like we went over several artworks by different artists in the class throughout the semester, but surprisingly, it was the telling of a past history with voice-over narration. Through art, this was an effort to give a voice to their isolated life in a foreign land where they had to face an anti-immigrant government policy every step of the way. Most of the time, one can see a Vietnamese girl named Veronika as the central character in her yellow dress and red silk around her arms. Actually, the video had a color theme of yellow and red. The Vietnamese flag has five yellow stars on a red backdrop. The red strars represent bloodshed during revolution and the yellow strars represent the various classes attained through enormous sacrifices.           
            This girl only had the two options of staying depressed while alienated in a foreign land or doing something for the right cause to have the whole world hear of them. She chose the second option to keep their future generation away from the fostering of betrayal, self-destruction, and depoliticization.
            They had these very special sound effects utilized to synchronize with the movements of the characters. Actually, you can see this when Veronika first starts to make a dance move by herself alone. You will then see these Polish kids joining her in that dance routine. The sound effect is so powerful that sometimes it takes you away from the dance.        
            There were so many moments that looked poetic to me. For example, in the super-imposition of Veronika having her sandwich and the fountain water, this Vietnamese girl shaking her head to the beat of music that was supposed to be coming from her headphones, as if to say, how to know the one that is good when there are millions, running around a pole holding a ribbon that was tied to the pole, as if to say, no matter how she ran, she would still be running around the same pole all the time, their band dancing in front of the monuments, and her throwing a rock onto the rubbles.          
            The light reflection on her cheek from her sequined hat looked beautiful. Despite all the lousy environment around her, she keeps practicing the dance routine, and that image transitions into a set of shackles on a concrete pole, which entails the challenge of her work. The image of the reflection of the movements of the leaves in a cool breeze and rain water transitioning into her rehearsal of singing on the hammer, now that might have some significance in terms of labor force or something I am not quite sure of. The hammer that was supposed to be a microphone, portrays her rising slowly for the task. I also liked her using a piece of glass to slice a strawberry. Now, different individuals may have different ways of looking at things and they may find a different connotation in it, but to me, this is to say, when you are not at home, you find something around to work out certain things. The light reflection of a tree’s leaves onto the green grass on the ground looked gorgeous. I think this video was a good example of telling people that there could be a million ways to express their thoughts. All you need to know is the art of putting things together that make sense to everyone around you.        
            IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS not only shows you the visual arts, but it also shows you the different approaches to mise-en-scene, structure, lighting, different dance postures, and story execution. Not to mention the different sound syncronization techniques. I really like the overall art experiments.