The City & The City

This video is composed of two channels: the first depicts Tokyo and Saigon in small vignettes on a split screen while the second channel is another split screen image of a man and a woman in separate rooms each singing karaoke in a choreographed interplay of Japanese and Vietnamese/English. The tightly framed images of the cities provide the architectonics of an emergent Asian urbanism produced through shared histories of modern warfare and occupations often obscured by intense expansions and modulations of capitalist spatiality. This series of exterior images contrasts with the close view of the two singers solitary in their separate rooms, performing songs that bring the present-tense into sharp and melancholic proximity with histories rendered through pop narratives and the intimate technology of the karaoke machine.