Chicago, Illinois – January 8, 2020 – Born in Japan, Noritaka Minami is a Chicago-based photographer currently exhibiting his unique and thoughtful SGN photo series, an investigation of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and the current state of the steel lattice towers first erected there by the French as utility poles during the early twentieth century to facilitate the development of the Indochinese Union. Despite the passage of time and the tumultuous history experienced in this region since their construction, these lattice towers have endured and remained a consistent presence in the built environment of the city. SGN will open on January 9 with a reception from 5:30 – 8 pm, and runs through February 14 at FLXST Contemporary, 2251 S. Michigan Ave. Suite 220, Chicago, IL 60616. Due to COVID 19 precautions, reception attendance and viewing is by appointment only and can be booked here or on the TOCK app.

The major social, political, and economic developments within Vietnamese society in recent decades have also led to these structures becoming a truly extraordinary visual sight. The number of cables now supported by the lattice towers far exceeds the original capacity of their design and has transformed each one into a unique, sculpture-like object.

The overwhelming quantity of cables that have accumulated on the lattice towers is the product of the rapid socio-economic transformations that Vietnam has experienced since reforms were initiated in 1986 with Đổi Mới (Renovation). The photographs in SGN examine these overlooked remnants of French colonialism in the contemporary landscape of Ho Chi Minh City as structures that represent the historical trajectory of the region as it evolved from one of the centers of the French colonial empire in Southeast Asia to the economic engine of an independent and developing nation attempting to merge socialism with global capitalism.

At this moment, these lattice towers and the innumerable cables they support are also starting to be removed from sight as part of the modernization of the city’s landscape in the twenty-first century. This recent tide of urban redevelopment and the decision to remove what is viewed as “blight” has only increased Minami’s sense of urgency to document these structures before they permanently disappear. With Vietnamese society in the midst of major changes, this photography series meditates on the past and considers the imminent future of this landscape through the presence and disappearance of these lattice towers.

Noritaka Minami is a photographer based in Chicago. He received a B.A. in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. In 2015, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Photography at Loyola University Chicago. He has also taught photography at Harvard University, Wellesley College, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, UC Berkeley, and UC Irvine.

He is a recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Santo Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. In 2015, he published a monograph titled 1972 – Nakagin Capsule Tower (Kehrer Verlag), which received the 2015 Architectural Book Award from the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. Solo exhibitions of his works have been held at Kana Kawanishi Gallery (Tokyo), SFO Museum (San Francisco), USC Roski School of Art and Design, UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and UC Merced Art Gallery. He has also shown in group exhibitions at Aperture (New York), Somerset House (London), Photo Basel (Basel), Las Cienegas Projects (Los Angeles), New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles), and Kearney Street Workshop (San Francisco). Minami’s works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, and Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago.

Chicago, Illinois – January 19, 2021 – FLXST Contemporary a young but noted fine arts and photography gallery and an arts incubator in Chicago’s historic and transitioning Motor Row District will open their first 2021 group show Against Impossibility on February 13 with a reception at 5:30 pm. The show runs through March 28 and exclusively features five artists of color, three of whom are international artists representing China – Weiyang Gao, Kuwait – Latifa Alajlan, France and Mexico – Alexis de Chaunac; two of whom are African Americans from the South, a black man – Ajmal “Mas Man” Millar and a cis-gendered black woman Siena Smith. FLXST Contemporary is located at 2251 S. Michigan Ave. Suite 220, Chicago, IL 60616. Due to COVID 19 precautions, reception attendance and viewing is by appointment only and can be booked here or on the TOCK app.

Against Impossibility brings together these five emerging contemporary artists who work across the mediums of sculpture, fibers and textiles, mixed-media, and painting who, despite their precarious positions as MFA students in their final year of studies, continue to produce work influenced by the tumult happening around them. FLXST Contemporary intentionally curated MFA students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to showcase how the current moment has affected this new wave of contemporary artists in Chicago working under extreme constraints because of the pandemic, new modes of learning art, new spaces to produce art outside of the academic setting, and working against impossible conditions.

As young, emerging contemporary creators, these artists had to adjust to the conditions around them and have had to ask difficult and often existential questions about their art practice and their identities as artists. Against Impossibility is about the perseverance of these artists and their work offers possible answers to the question of why art matters during these moments of crisis.
FLXST Contemporary’s gallery director and founder Jan Christian Bernabe is a Filipinx American queer person of color based in Chicago. Jan has given an extensive curatorial statement about the show:

“We ended 2020 with signs of change in the United States, a new elected President, and two promising vaccines to battle the COVID pandemic. Change seemed to be on the horizon, a transformation in American culture that many believed could move us away from the hateful rhetoric against people of color, the LGBTQ community, and immigrants unabashedly condoned by President Trump, his congressional allies, and his supporters. The breakneck speed of the development and approval of two COVID-19 vaccines in December captured the global cooperation of doctors and scientists to finally combat a virus that by the end of the year had killed over 300,000 people in the US alone. The last two months of 2020 looked as though the new year would bring back a semblance of normalcy in the US and around the world.

With the odds stacked against FLXST Contemporary’s survival in 2020, we rolled into the new year working harder than ever developing an art program for 2021 that aligned with our mission to support and exhibit the very best of contemporary art by artists of color, LGBTQ artists, and immigrant artists. Last year showed us that art matters tremendously during times of crisis. Our art programming last year offered Chicagoans a means to cope with all that was happening in the world and ways to think about and to make meaning of moments of racial and social unrest that was happening all around us through the artwork exhibited in the gallery. The insurrection that occurred during the first week of January that we witnessed at the U.S. Capitol fomented by the conservative media, Republican legislators, and the President of the United States proves to us that we continue to live in a state of precarity—a moment of impossibility that as a gallery and as artists, we continue to work against.”