Thao Nguyen Phan: Myth and Metaphor
Thao Nguyen Phan describes moving images as 'a cascade of reincarnations'.
Exhibition view: Thao Nguyen Phan, Reincarnations of Shadows, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (14 September 2023–14 January 2024). Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca. Photo: Agostino Osio.
For 15 years or so, the Vietnamese artist has brought the past to life in myriad ways, intermingling references to nature, art, spirituality, and politics in paintings, sculptures, installations, text pieces, and films. Born in 1987, she studied art in Vietnam and the U.S., where she was mentored by American video and performance artist Joan Jonas.
Like Jonas, Phan often focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural world, real and fantastical realms, the colonisation of lands and minds, and the therapeutic power of storytelling and ritual. She explained: 'I feel that the impossibility for humans to remember and learn from their past lives creates damage and suffering in our current, and perhaps future, lives.' She sees Vietnam's official history as 'a grand myth', and believes that 'folklore, fiction and oral history can carry more truth than historic account. ... Myth becomes a metaphor, a mirror to comprehend the truth, and an escape from harsh reality.'
Phan's video Becoming Alluvium (2019) is a meditation on the living and dead who haunt what she calls 'the glory and the tragedy' of the mighty trans-boundary Mekong river. More recently, Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem) (2023), a 16-minute split-screen film which premiered at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in September, is a homage to the late sculptor Diem Phung Thi whose achievements, like those of so many important female artists, were ignored during Phan's studies at art school in Ho Chi Minh City.
Phan has long honoured a cross-section of historic women in her work, including the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi and the Irish architect Eileen Gray—thinkers of great originality who battled patriarchal structures. When Phan came across Thi's work in 2010, she wrote that her 'early obsession with her' turned into 'a lifetime appointment'.1
As Phan makes clear in Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem), Thi's life embodies the turmoil of 20th-century Vietnamese history. Born in the old capital of Hue in 1920, she lost her mother as a small child and spent nine years travelling through Vietnam's Central Highlands with her father. In 1946, she was one of the first women to graduate with a degree in dentistry at Hanoi Medical University. During the First Indochina War, Thi joined the resistance. When her fiancé was killed on the battlefield, suffering mentally and physically, she moved to France. Bombarded by war reports in newspapers and on the television, at the age of almost 40, she found refuge in art; initially, she took it up to divert herself from the horrors of her country's tragedy and her personal sense of displacement. She was soon creating powerful and original sculptures, from jewellery to monumental public works. In 1992, Thi returned to Vietnam where she died in 2002, at 81. She is now recognised as an important modernist innovator.
The 16 minutes or so of Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem) is more poem than biopic. A woman narrates episodes from Thi's life against a backdrop of images that blur and sharpen, like snatches of wakefulness amid a reverie. Meaning emerges from a series of dreamy non sequiturs: a woman seen through a cane curtain or crossing a narrow wooden bridge across a lively stream; someone pushing leaves into a gourd; Thi in her studio, her sculptures looming over her, or laughing, surrounded by children, holding red flowers. 'The narrative between Diem Phung Thi and I', says Phan, 'should not be told in a single language. It's a multilingual tale, between me, between Diem and among other souls in tune'.2 Interspersed throughout the film are quotes from other artists, filmmakers, and writers, both living and dead—Phan Dinh Hoi (who was Thi's personal assistant), Matsuo Bashō, Jonas Mekas, Irit Rogoff, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Jean Tardieu. Together, they form a community of sources that reiterate a synergy across time and place.
Phan is also part of Art Labor, a Ho Chi Minh City-based collective. In an interview, she explained: 'We are all at once an artist, a curator, a writer, a farmer, an anthropologist, an architect and much more.' Their work has involved running a pop-up hammock café, organising exhibitions with Indigenous Jarai artists, or running art classes for children in hospital.
The last words of Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem) are from an old Vietnamese song: 'The brushwood we gather, stack it together, it makes a hut. Pull it apart, a field once more.'
'Such', the narrator observes, 'is my way of thinking. I find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns and shadows, the light and darkness that one thing against another creates.' —[O]
