Connecting people through art 

Jun Nguyen-Hatsusiba

Ho!Ho!Ho! Merry Christmas - Battle of Easel Point - Memorial Project Okinawa

Nguyen-Hatsushiba was born in Tokyo in 1968 to Vietnamese and Japanese parents and is currently based in Ho Chi Minh City. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992 and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1994.

With an international background, and having studied in the United States, it is not surprising that his work is concerned with issues such as 1990s globalization and internationalization. He interlaces these concerns with his own search for identity.

Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle of Easel Point—Memorial Project Okinawa (2003) refers to Okinawa both as an important battle site during World War II and as a training ground for American troops during the Vietnam War. In this film, divers go underwater carrying easels and armed with paint to participate in a painting "battle." Commenting on the representation and interpretation of war, the divers in this film struggle to create portraits of Hollywood actors who starred in glamorized films about the Vietnam War, but there are no winners and the futile mission cannot be completed.

The film – its title imitating the typical exclamation of the American Santa Claus – on the one hand recalls the American attack on North Vietnam, which took place during the Christmas holidays, and on the other the population of the island of Okinawa, which had to suffer US occupation from the battle of Okinawa in 1945 until its return to Japan in 1972. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba also shot this film in the sea near the US military base.