flower market - Dao Mai Hong Hue Lan Lai Tra Sen Cuc - 9 names, 9 essences and the old bill.. can’t translate in mother language either cho hoa, 9 cai ten gai, 9 mui hoa va mot cai ten la hay to bac cu.. cung khong dich duoc tieng me de
2019
installation
artificial floral scents from Viet Huong lab, a single shelf.
Often known as the world’s oldest profession, Cam Xanh’s MoT Doi Gai | A Beach Life explores the theme of prostitution at a conceptual level. starting with a quote from Gore Vidal that “we are all prostitutes in one sense or another, ethically if not sexually”, the exhibition goes on to investigate the contemporary relationships between feminism, love and sexuality, art, beauty, power, economics, and the potential for exploitation that emerges at their intersections.
MoT Doi Gai | A Beach Life is the culmination of Cam Xanh’s close studio in the MoT+++ space. Cam Xanh is the second in a series of occupations of the gallery space from the MoT+++ collective.
Cam Xanh further invokes the subjective experience of the viewer with her final work in the exhibition. engaging the global tendency to name females as flowers, she matches the Vietnamese name of the locally produced scent with its internationally recognised English designation: ‘lan/magnolia’, ‘lotus/sen’. the nine scents are positioned exposed to their viewer, on show for consumption like the market flowers and the prostituting women they personify. the aroma they form is synthetically created, a molecular falsity that begs the question of what love is, and whether it is possible to fake or buy. Cam Xanh positions their shelf like a hyphen connecting the works of her exhibition to her original inspiration, and leaves an empty space at its end to close her show with an open question. the last word is given without translation and comes from ‘old bill’, whose scent the viewer is urged to imagine. the ambiguity of the phrase ‘old bill’, with its double meaning of money, calls upon personal memories of used currency and its smell to conjure affect in its viewer. without making a sound, ‘old bill’ speaks of patriarchy, pimps, power and the growth of our current capitalist system - the history of the world and its transactions encompassed within its absence.