Quynh Dong’s extended research on Nguyễn Gia Trí, a Vietnamese painter who perfected the traditional technique of lacquer painting combining East Asian and Western techniques, who was at the same time one of the pioneers of Vietnamese modern art and the cultural codes of the modern Vietnamese identity as a synthesis of French colonialism and Vietnamese patriotism, led her to make her video clip Sweet Noel. The artist re-appropriates the allegorical and desiring approach of Nguyễn Gia Trí from his North-Centre-South Spring Garden, 1970-1990, a work which reveals figures that are like reflections on the surface of the water or beneath the water, a painting created by overlaying films of shiny amber materials that make the surface shimmer in all spectral nuances. This makes it ideal for digital re-translation. As in every translation something is lost and something new is gained, the artist re-enacts the gentle young ladies from the painting in order to de-video-analyze them and détourne their feminine appearance into a landscape of floral or a garden of artificial of highly blown-up details bigger than the human figures. By these means, the artist creates a flat shiny surface and blooming simulated space of electric bits of a hybrid world – a simulacra in which the artist multiplies the appearance of her characters in the digital repetition of the same. If the myth is a world without beginning and without origin, it also gives the key or the code to the interpretation of the new stories, the artist’s feminine character finds itself born of the multiplication of the same in a non-authentic world predetermined by technological simulations and their mythologies. The discrepancy of scale between her female figures and the flora can be read as a critique of the colonialist interest to gather ethnographical and scientific information from everything, even art. Text courtesy of Demitrina Sevova