Looking Down series
2013-ongoing
Oil on X-ray film backing. 20 x 25cm
Looking down is a series of small paintings on x-ray film backings depicting human figures looking down. Looking down is simply looking down, looking for something, or bowing. Phan was intrigued by the material of x-ray film backing because as a found object it carries a part of the patient who used it. The inspiration for these paintings comes from the artist’s research on the Japanese occupation of French Indochina. During the research, Phan hardly found any archival images directly related to the period in Indochina, but plenty in neighboring countries, such as in British Malaya and the Philippines. During a visit to Former Ford Factory in Singapore, the site where British forces surrendered to the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942, Phan encountered a photograph in the museum’s archive of a local woman bowing to Japanese soldiers when they passed her on the street. It made a significant impact on her perception on the meaning of the gesture and what it signified. From the initial photograph Phan developed a collection of painted gestures on found X-ray film backings with images taken from various resources: books, historical archives, the Internet, etc. The figure is stripped of his or her background and represented in a timeless, non-specific space.
http://san-art.org/exhibition/right-fiction/
