“Chickens of the Torrid Summer” was a solo exhibition at the Norwalk Community College in 2014. It was an exhibition of paintings and prints using the subject of chickens as a way to explore imaginations of the Vietnam War. The below writing was the catalog introduction.

Chicken
by James Prosek

There is a frenetic pace to Tammy Nguyen’s new body of work, and because a central theme is chickens, a popular saying comes to mind—like a ___________ with its head cut off.

As anyone who has witnessed the source of this expression, the chicken’s body continues to run around in all direc- tions without a brain to direct it—blood spurting as it goes. The spattered blood that springs from the still beating heart, in the absence of a head, is part of the expressionistic side of the art works in this visually arresting exhibition; whereas the representational side clearly says ‘chicken’ loud and clear. In the midst of the blood and the featherless chickens, there are cloudlike wisps of yellowed chicken fat and popping eyeballs that also resemble eggs with visible yolks as the eyes’ pupils.

So why chickens?

The Last Champion, 2014

There are deep and myriad cultural, political, and historical associations and issues we can extract including the domestication of wild animals (chickens were domesticated originally from Asian jungle cocks), the mistreatment of captive animals for our markets and sustenance, and ubiquity of the bird in third world Asia (Nguyen is of Viet- namese ancestry).

Nguyen’s first encounter with the chicken in its transition from living animal to food was at her friend’s restaurant in Ninh Binh, a northern mountain region of Vietnam. A woman in the kitchen was dipping a freshly killed chicken in hot boiling water. As she gently pulled the feathers off the bird she asked Nguyen if she was hungry. This was a vivid memory for Nguyen—witnessing the process of taking something’s life in order to sustain our own. Previously the intermediate steps between live chicken and food had been concealed. Here the continuum was visible. Nguyen began to think of other interstitial processes that lay hidden from our view—in birth and in war—and in her mind still associates them with this initial experience with the chicken.

To her soup of associations surrounding the chicken, both personal and universal, Nguyen adds cutouts from Viet- nam War era comic books. They are portraits of chickens arched in a tight composition (as if embryonic) trying to

gasp for air in a jungle where men in camouflage wait to ambush with guns. These soldiers are bearers of blood — an imaginary experience to Nguyen as she is an American-born daughter to Vietnamese refugees. Here, blood is realized through Nguyen’s appropriation of sensationalized imagery— like from a blockbuster movie.

Put all this in the hands of an accomplished painter and a master printmaker and you have something beautiful, strange, inexplicable, and bold. Each piece seems to strut off its stretcher bars or off the paper, filled with confidence but also agitation and a lot of nervous energy. The chicken is prey—who is waiting to take them out? What shad- ow is lurking over them? At what precise moment will they be hit or captured, and will feathers fly? As a viewer, personally, I start to feel part feathered cluck-er myself—is this the point? To remind us of the vulnerability of life?

Every viewer will be left to wonder while walking through the exhibition—why the chicken?—and will be left to search for an answer from their own set of experiences. Chances are we’ve all eaten one, and seen them both alive, racing along the ground or pecking—and dead, laying in shrink wrap or hanging in the market. Maybe we’ve even been awaken by one at dawn—their crowing marks the new day.

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Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age with Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Prosek’s work have been shown The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC among others. Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler.

In Spring of 2019, I was invited by Galerie Nichido Taipei to continue my work from “Chickens of the Torrid Summer”. I created six woodblocks from the original key block in the Norwalk exhibition. Later in the Summer of the same year, the exhibition traveled to Tokyo, Japan to its sister gallery, Nichido Contemporary Art where I created two more paintings expanding the narrative into my more recent inquiries. Below is an artist statement included in the Japan exhibition as part of curiously enough, Vol 2. with Samak Kosem and Dusadee Pang Huntrakul.

Everything I know about the Vietnam War and everything that I don't is filled in with my imagination.   Even as I continue to have experiences unrelated to my family's trauma, it is not uncommon for me to project fantasies of battle and bloodshed when I see such examples.  

Two years ago, I witnessed several exhilarating cockfights in the area known as Pateros in Manila.  The crowd was like a big cloud, raining in cheer and gambles. Scattered throughout the crowd were these men, known as the "Cristos" who were the bookies.   They would wave their hands in the air like clockwork– one finger, two fingers, three fingers– to indicate what bets were being played. "Cristos", of course, also means "Christ"– so here we are witnessing a marathon of fights to the death and placing our bets with the One and only. 

Much of Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines, so there I was, my first time in Manila, heart full of excitement and anxiety as I watched the battle of chickens.  I stretched my imagination (as Francis Ford Coppola did) and stretched it into this arena. The painting Coming of Grass in Pateros,  depicts the climax of a cockfight when one chicken will win.  But, as the cyclical qualities of war tend to be, this climax foreshadows the forthcoming of yet another battle– which is one way to think about the Vietnam War; while one war was fought, it is inevitable that another war will be fought again, but internally by the next generations to come, wherever those generations might be.  

I happened to have been born and raised in San Francisco, and now I am fascinated with land.  Last month, I visited the Phong Nha karst in Quang Binh Province, Vietnam for the first time and enjoyed a few small expeditions into caves millions of years old.  On the way to one cave, our group needed to walk through a vast area of grass. Buffalo roamed peacefully, and there were these circular ditches and plateaus in the ground.  I learned that this is how the dead from the nearby villages are buried and reburied. First, they are buried into these big circular ditches until the body disintegrates. Then, they are dug up and transferred into another grave next to older relatives.  

For the occasion of curiously enough, Vol. 2,  I thought about this circular ditch as the site where the bets have been buried, perhaps by the Cristos.   The bets though, are not bets from cock fights as they have been metabolized through my imagination and turned into useless and memory-less accounts of the Vietnam War.  The ditch featured in Landscape for the Cristos, is where these fantasies are buried.   

The Double Yolked Egg, Intermission 2, 2014

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