Thus the abjection written into the production of plastic water bottles by American companies mirrors the disposability attributed to Vietnamese lives by US necropolitics. Urine coloring the yellow star of the US and Vietnamese flag can be interpreted as the collapse of “official” delineations marking past and present US Vietnam relations through the memory of water and the body working together. Like the encased area the performers are trapped in, Vietnamese people can find no refuge in Vietnam or the US. They are trapped in their homeland and abroad — like water in a plastic bottle. In addition, the performers laboring over US commodities by way of ingestion and urination reduces the body to its orifical functions. Caged performers urinating to create the US flag ad nauseum as computer graphic US planes rain bombs on them, encapsulates the constricting US authority that subordinates Vietnamese people. Speaking to how animality has been utilized by structures of authority to dehumanize and objectify certain people into subordination, Mel Chen distinguishes objectification from dehumanization with a quote from Marx’s “Estrangement of Labor” in order to illuminate industrialization’s impoverishment of life through notions of estrangement, animality, and control relationships: Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity…the external character of labour for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to himself but to the another… The result is that man feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions –– eating, drinking, procreating… while in his human functions, he is nothing more than an animal.In spite of the objectification and animal like treatment of performers in the film, who labor over creating the US flag with American commodities and their urine,vertical farm tower the artist asserts that “the slow acts of picking up, and then working with thousands of bottles of mineral water, are also metaphorical actions for landmine removal…at the same time, [they] are also metaphorical images for sowing .

Through the simultaneous metaphor of these two behaviors, the image of Vietnam in the recent period [emerges]  an image of reconstruction and renewal.”Opposed to the renewal or reconstruction suggested by the artist to seemingly resolve his melancholic mourning, the true decathexis or “purification” from the artist’s attachment to loss comes from the concluding scenes of the film, where the photojournalist is shot to death by three bullets through the lens of the camera with a violent “ejaculation of blood standing in or the pain of death” .The artist’s death at the end of the film can be seen as a part of melancholia when the superego hosts a death drive due to the ego’s failure to “preserve loss by suspending and controlling time.”After trying to keep alive the losses sustained by Vietnamese people, the photojournalist’s death repeats the trauma of war upon the body of the artist in one final moment. Instead of death being a process of life, in this game as in necropolitics, it is seen as termination. But the artist’s termination can be seen as the death of the symbolic self constructed within a symbolic order rather than an actual physical death. He considers this film his last artwork he made before ending his artistic career; thus, the death drive seems to stem from a desire to “obliterate the cage of the signifying network itself” exemplified through the prison like space and American stars that dominated the performance.By obliterating his symbolic self within the US structure of death and inequality, the artist freed himself psychologically from the US narrative that has defined his identity and the Vietnam War. Delving into Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba’s decision to play the part of a photojournalist, a deeper understanding of his thoughts about US propaganda can be uncovered. The beginning of the film opens with the message “You are a photojournalist, life is your game… Inviting you to survive.” Shot in a video game format known as a “first person shooter” point of view, the spectator takes on the perspective of a photojournalist in the midst of war . By highlighting the political nature of documentation, this orientation critiques photojournalism’s role in the Vietnam War for having provided the American public a false sense of witnessing that capitalized on the sensationalization of Vietnamese suffering through “screen memories.”

These screen memories that photojournalism contributed include, but are not limited to, extensive bombing campaigns across Vietnam, the massacre at My Lai, and children being burned by napalm.These dehumanizing images ignore the long term, attritional fatalities of war from toxins such as Agent Orange that go increasingly uncounted in projected casualties of future wars.Adding on to this point, the US’s decision to not acknowledge the Vietnamese lives lost in the Vietnam War Memorial clearly shows how art and the media shape the political, hierarchical organization of lives. The double meaning of to “shoot” with a camera or a gun transforms photojournalism’s figurative ability to “kill” other perspectives of war into a literally fatal contributor to the long term scheme of necropolitics. In an attempt to remediate these representational inequalities of war traumas, the artist himself performs in the film as the photojournalist character named “Jun Uncooks” . This name can be linked to Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba’s earlier practice of cooking sticky rice and applying it to surfaces where it would dry and crust off as a metaphor for a refugee’s sense of displacement in a new land. However, it can also be linked to the computing term “uncook”: to repair a file that has been damaged or “cooked.”In the latter sense of the name “Uncooks,” the artist seeks to restore Vietnamese experiences by offering a juxtaposition of overlapping temporalities — between the war torn past and the contaminated present. His acknowledgment of the present day residues of war expands understandings of invisible assertions of domination. Unlike his previous films that were filmed in the seemingly limitless underwater expanses of the ocean, the enclosed landscape of the water bottle field uncovers a more sobering view of Vietnam’s relationship to the disempowering violence of US geopolitics and modernization. The artist as a photojournalist,vertical plant tower serves as a militant mourner that defends against erasures and revisions of Vietnamese history. Repetiton allowed Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba to challenge, recreate, and deconstruct his memories of the Vietnam War. Consistently mourning and returning to a particular moment in history attests to one artist’s militant dedication to repetition and eventual “destruction” through a metaphorical death. In Jacques Derrida’s “The Ends of Man,” the “end” could mean both disappearance and accomplishment.

In her essay, “Repetition, Revenge, Plasticity,” Catherine Malabou quotes Derrida as so, “The human is achieved in its disappearance, in becoming inhuman, nonhuman, post human… Such is the apocalyptic nature of the human: its destruction is its truth, whereupon the unity of death and completion, dissolution and achievement, are to be revealed.”The concepts of the nonhuman, post human, and beyond represent the human possibility of alterity.Within this realm, artist Jae Rhim Lee seeks to question what is “properly” human and beyond the human about death in her Infinity Burial Project . When speaking to the plasticity of humans and repetitive nature, Malabou presents Nietzsche’s argument that humans seek revenge for the passage of time, transiency, and passing away.Malabou goes on to include Nietzsche’s assertion that “The essence of humanity is to repeat its anger and dispossession; it is always too late.”This repetitive revenge towards death is prominent in the creation of countless US produced Vietnam War movies that constantly repeat violence upon the peoples and land of Vietnam in order to create a manufactured heroic transcendence for American soldiers.A war practice relating more closely to Lee’s ambitions to make post mortem practices more eco friendly, embalming was first used in the US for the purpose of preserving soldier’s bodies from the battlefield long enough to be transported to family members during the Civil War. Modern embalming practices were introduced during the Civil War and have persisted in funerary practices to this day; thus heroism, embalming practices, and death denial are inextricably linked. Before Jae Rhim Lee was interested in post mortem burial practices, concepts of death were always at the core of her works. Born in Gwangju, Korea in 1975, Lee had a traumatic experience of death as a young child. Upon the death of Lee’s grandfather, her mother became overcome with grief and despair.Later, as a college student, Lee had an immensely difficult time accepting the death of roommate who struggled with mental illness and committed suicide. Despite Lee’s historically negative relationship with death, she faces her fears head on in her art practice. In 2006, Lee received a Master’s in Science at MIT’s Department of Architecture upon the completion of a sculptural performance piece called N=1=NPK=KIMCHI=N along with a written thesis. In order to grow cabbage and make the Korean side dish called “kimchi” Lee optimized her urine with a strict diet and constructed a feedback control system in the form of a living unit complete with a hydroponic garden, urinal, urine processor, bed and kitchen. Picking apart the title of her performance piece is needed in order to understand her complex project.

“NPK” represents nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium since they are the elements that are present in human urine and are the main macronutrients required by all plants. Moving on, the “N” present at the beginning and end of the title stands for “narcissism” and the Greek myth of Narcissus. Finally, “N=1” refers to the scientific notation indicating the number of subjects in a given study and her role as the sole experimental subject. Her goal was “to achieve a still, weightless body and [distribute] the body via growing and sharing vegetables made with one’s urine” as a “simulation of death, [a] thought experiments of an irrevocable, terminal state enacted through the body.”In her thesis, Jae Rhim Lee considers “death [as] the medium between the body and the self,” and her research pertaining to N=1=NPK=KIMCHI=N helps illuminate a deeper understanding of her Infinity Burial Project.The Infinity Burial Project is also titled N=1=0=Infinity.This lesser known title is proof of a strong conceptual continuation from Lee’s investigations in N=1=NPK=KIMCHI=N to her most recent Infinity Burial Project. Except this time, the “0” in N=1=0=Infinity, denotes her eventual death that will provide nutrients for microorganisms present in the Earth and become a part of the infinite cycle of decomposition and regeneration.Although decomposition is equally as important as production,the body becomes a feared symbol of mortality since it is vulnerable to death and decay, and in retaliation, humans create systems of meaning in order to elevate the animal status of the body to that of a cultural symbol in order to minimize psychic fragility towards death.Lee is cognizant of heroism as areaction against the fear of death. Citing the book, Denial of Death, by Ernst Becker she argues that the struggle for heroism is central to human nature due to an “orgasmic narcissism” stemming from an innate need for self esteem. For example, amidst the Covid 19 pandemic, healthcare workers have been burdened with the media’s labels of heroism and people cheer from their homes worldwide in joyous support of these essential workers. While recognizing the hardships and importance of healthcare workers is an important societal response to the pandemic, heroism masks over three important topics: the duties and limits of health care workers, the importance of societal and institutional reciprocity towards supporting health care workers during and not during a pandemic, and the negative psychological toll that expectations of heroism can have on healthcare workers whom have personal anxieties and difficulties stemming from their line of work.As Becker is quoted in Lee’s thesis, “Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.”Heroism works to conceptually preserve human life in direct response to death in war, everyday life, or a pandemic. As a result, Lee tries to expand conversations about death and green burial options in order to ease fears of death in environmentally and psychologically beneficial ways.