The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music

THE PROPELLER GROUP

Since 2006, Phunam, Matt Lucero, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, aka The Propeller Group, have been merging visual art and mass media production to erode our trust in the images we are fed—through branding, marketing, and other forms of propaganda. As they describe: “We’re invested in trying to understand how ‘image’ is produced […] the public image as produced through media and advertising, and the creation of meaning and social affect.” Appropriately, they work out of studios based in Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles. As former graffiti artists, The Propeller Group brings a streets-eye perspective and guerilla approach to all of their work. Their projects include Television Commercial for Communism (2011), in which they challenged the world’s top advertising agencies to re-brand Communism, resulting in a frighteningly anodyne commercial that whitewashes the tragic ramifications of this infamous ideology.