“Masked Force” is a small experiment towards a poetics of looking. A poetics of looking that gently tries, despite the likelihood of failure, to protect the enigma of photographs against the desire of critics, and sometimes image-makers themselves, to argumentatively, brutally explain a picture to death.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer and translator born in Việt Nam. Her most recent publication is Chronicles of a Village (2022), a translation of a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Jacket2, Modern Poetry in Translation, and other venues. She is a Stanford University graduate and has received support from the PEN/Heim Fund and the Institute for Comparative Modernities, among other honors.

In a mangrove forest the solemn women walk in line. Wearing masks with holes for the eyes, the revolutionary officers look like pious pilgrims performing a cryptic ritual. In enemy territory these women are often disguised as sidewalk peddlers to collect enemy intelligence, transmit messages, or store weapons for the resistance. In clandestine cabins in the forest, as Võ explains, they convene and study the tenets of guerrilla warfare to enhance their political consciousness. The masks hide their identities from one another in case of capture and interrogation. It is a pragmatic gesture, not a sign of terrorism or fanaticism as a viewer might imagine at first glance. The white, soft fabric of the masks glows in the light, impenetrably exuding a climate of disquiet. The masks also funnel the viewer’s attention on the faceless animacy of the female officers, who seem unagitated by the camera’s petrifying eye as they move along the slender wooden bridge. Carrying both motion and stillness in their barefoot gait, they are plainly dressed in the no-frills, versatile apparel of the Mekong Delta working class: gingham headscarves, glossy black pants, and bà ba silk shirts, longsleeved, button-down, cinched at the waist. The white array of homespun masks punctuates their humble pastoral presence with a bewitching flavor of fright.

Artist Reflection

“Masked Force” is a small experiment towards a poetics of looking. A poetics of looking that gently tries, despite the likelihood of failure, to protect the enigma of photographs against the desire of critics, and sometimes image-makers themselves, to argumentatively, brutally explain a picture to death. A poetics of looking that sees the past as a disorienting land strewn thick with absence and loss, a moor that crawls with rifts where meaning drops. A poetics of looking infatuated with what Gaston Bachelard calls the “unfathomable oneiric depth” of felicitous images. A poetics of looking where words and images are softly interleaved so that the former might refrain from loudly, heroically, desperately striving to interpret, master, and besiege the latter. A poetics of looking that wishes to make space for the abyssal magic of photographs to breathe, and infinitely expand, instead of extinguishing the enchantment with airless captions and useful lessons. A poetics of looking that births not pedagogical moralizations but shards of reverie. A poetics of looking that listens to both the laments and the laughs latent in an image, both the freedoms and the unfreedoms born of a revolution. A poetics of looking that descends the imaginal underworld of a past catastrophe that ceaselessly binds and permeates the present. A vaporous poetics of looking that floats down a river of photographs—a stream of ghosts enwrapped in the yarns of time. A winding poetics of looking that drifts with the haze of images, dreams them into twilit being.