The Brooklyn Rail

Tomas Vu’s Blackstar 16/25/60, an exhibition at the alternative art space Locust Projects in Miami, is as much a shrine to David Bowie as it is an investigation into the nature of fandom, and how we use pop cultural markers as wayfinding points in our own personal journeys. Vu’s own story has a hint of the epic and mythological. He spent his early childhood in Vietnam during the American War. When Saigon fell he and his siblings followed his mother, an interpreter for the invading US military, and her husband, a soldier of the South Vietnamese army, to the United States. Vu spoke little to no English and was bullied by his white classmates; he communicated with them by drawing pictures. This was the genesis of his artistic life.

In his telling, Bowie was always present in some form. Blackstar 16/25/60 serves as the conclusion of a trilogy of installations for Vu following similar presentations in Brooklyn and Berlin, and those two earlier encounters drew more particularly on moments in the artist’s life in which the rockstar’s work had a strong influence. In Berlin in 2019, 69/19/45 Space Oddity invoked the promise of the future, epitomized by the 1969 American moon landing Vu watched excitedly in a GI bar in Saigon. Despite, or perhaps because, of the war raging around him, those visions beamed in from beyond the atmosphere, alongside Bowie’s tale of an astronaut lost in space, materialized in the artist a naïve belief that scientific and technological innovation would lift humanity further beyond into the stars. 76/22 The Man Who Fell To Earth, installed at the Boiler in Brooklyn in 2022 and named after the Nicolas Roeg movie in which Bowie starred, subsequently deals with the death of this dream. As a refugee flying from the jungles of Vietnam to the bleak desert landscape of El Paso, an adolescent Vu found a kindred spirit in Bowie’s character of Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien fruitlessly searching an increasingly polluted Earth for a solution to his home planet’s extinction.

Vu’s life story is one that feels like a summation of the twentieth century, the most destructive period in human history as well as the one where creativity became industrialized. He was a child of war, but also a child of television. The aesthetics of the Space Age are all over the show, and they present a nostalgic vision that emphasizes the vibrancy and tactility of the heyday of rock and roll as well as the pluck of DIY culture. Holographic posters cover the walls and a wooden stage is coated with screenprinted facsimiles of Bowie’s concert flyers and movie posters (Vu also screenprinted a load of free T-shirts to be given away to visitors). A psychedelic lamp shade rotates on a turntable, casting bright orange light. Projections on the wall cast videos of Bowie in concert juxtaposed with home videos from Vu’s early life.

Elements of the earlier installations recur, with mementos from each one placed throughout the gallery: a ceramic skull repaired with kintsugi from 69/19/45 Space Oddity, a pair of surfboards engraved with Bowie lyrics from 76/22 The Man Who Fell To Earth. Yet key differences prevail in Blackstar 16/25/60 that signal a more interactive, participatory bent. Inside a geodesic dome ported from the previous show sits a chaise lounge, a table with a record player and reading material, and a crate full of records, everything from Bowie and his seventies rock and new wave contemporaries (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Cars, Eurythmics, Pink Floyd) to Nils Frahm, and the War of the Worlds radio show. A slipcase holds books by R. Buckminster Fuller and Ted Kaczynski.

More important is that the space is actually being put to use: Vu has invited any and all visitors to enter and activate it in any way they see fit. The artist chose Locust Projects as a staging ground for the show because they were the only place he contacted that would allow him to do this, and subsequently the venue has hosted music nights with bands and musicians, vinyl listening sessions, a “live coding” workshop, and even a Bowie trivia night.

That choice to turn over the space to the audience turns the project into more than an exercise in cautious nostalgia. Instead it forces us to consider that creation itself is the ultimate form of fandom, that we must reciprocate the artistry of another with our own. Was Bowie a deified rock star, or was he simply an artist trying to interpret the world in the same way that Vu chose Bowie’s work as a means of making sense of his own life and experience? After all, the last song Bowie released, the final track of his final album Blackstar, is titled “I Can’t Give Everything Away”—we have to give some back in return.