Opaque Signs - A Fundraising Show by Sàn Art, 17 December 2019 — 22 January 2020, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A Fundraising Show by Sàn Art
Location: Sàn Art
Millennium Masteri Unit B6.17 & B6.16
132 Bến Vân Đồn, Ward 6, District 4, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

“Opaque Signs” is a celebration of works graciously donated by Sàn Art’s artist-friends on the occasion of the organization’s twelfth year running. Though diverse in terms of forms, concepts and references, these gifts share a material element of luminosity. As store signs made of neon and LED lights proliferate across Vietnamese cities, light becomes a default symbol of pervasive commerce, of sleepless advertisement, of a permanent “on” mode of being, perennially open to transaction.

Radiance reaches further back into our modern obsession with sight. The rhetoric of illumination and clarity has long supported the human desire to see, to discover, to champion objectivity and reason, to extend the project of enlightenment, to expose zones of darkness, to rectify ravines of unreason.

Away from its associations with civilization, technocracy and global hyperconsumerism, the dazzle of modern light could be regarded alongside its dialectical opposite—the realm of the unexposed, the undisclosed, the self-veiled. Otherworlds of opacity and indefinability, with traces of unofficial histories and private observations, are activated around the blithe shine of the works. Across the gallery, presence and concealment fuse, glowing into a world of their own, where shadows tease and tempt, while relentlessly refusing, silver interpretation.

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In this exhibition:

Ly Hoàng Ly repeats a pattern of sunken solidity, fabricating a threshold between stability and precarity / Trương Công Tùng transmits the unseeable from under the erosive shrouds of time / Đỉnh Q. Lê remixes revolutionary boilerplates with symbols of wealth in a sardonic sculpture-text / Orawan Arunrak meditates on the sacred light and routines that keep humans praying, wishing / Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan presents a faceless figure—a silhouette, a corpse, an apparition—floating across possibilities of reincarnation / Phan Thảo Nguyên embraces “dreadful optimism” on the wings of ideology and reveries / Nguyễn Phương Linh conjures an emptied nail salon, a menacing space of transformation / Richard Streitmatter-Trần proposes a perception of Saigon as a season where memories grow, wither, incessantly flicker / ƯuĐàm Trần Nguyễn sketches a terribly quiet scream, an elongated longing for somewhere unknown, a telegram for whom, who could know

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Curation: Sàn Art
Design & Production: Nhật Q. Võ
Exhibition Text: Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên

Once again, a resonant thank-you to the artists who have supported our fundraiser, the generous humans who have either donated an existing artwork or submitted an idea (a sketch, a shape, a photograph, a line of text, a single word) for us to materialize into light.  

http://san-art.org/exhibition/opaque-signs/

Becoming Alluvium, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona 16 November 2019 — 6 January 2020

As 2018 recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Video Art Award, artist Thao Nguyen Phan will present Becoming Alluvium, an installation of video and painting at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain, this autumn within the frame of LOOP Festival 2019.

The Han Nefkens Foundation has supported the production and presentation of this new work at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona as well as further presentations at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels and at the Chisenhale Gallery in London.

Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium exhibitions will be accompanied by an illustrated publication. Designed by Ok Kyung Yoon, Curated by Hilde Teerlinck, edited by the Han Nefkens Foundation, and co-edited by Fundació Joan Miro, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre and Chisenhale Gallery with the support of Galerie Zink Waldkirchen. It is published and distributed by Mousse Publishing.

https://www.fmirobcn.org/en/exhibitions/5761/becoming-alluvium

Hugo Boss Asia Art 2019, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, Oct 18, 2019 - Jan 5, 2020

The Rockbund Art Museum together with HUGO BOSS hereby announce that an exhibition of artworks by finalists in the 2019 edition of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists will open on October 18, 2019 at the museum. 

The HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists since its inception in 2013 has encouraged and promoted new and diverse narratives in contemporary Asian art, while continuously reviewing and improving its own selection methodology. This year’s competition will employ the same process as last year’s, where finalists are carefully chosen from a list of names established by a multiregional group of nominators and a selection jury. Following from the deliberations of the nominating committee, the finalist artists of the fourth edition of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award are: Hao Jingban(Mainland China), Hsu Che-Yu (Taiwan), Eisa Jocson (Philippines) and Thảo-Nguyên Phan (Vietnam).

From October 18, 2019 to January 5, 2020, an exhibition of works by the four finalists will be open to the public at the Rockbund Art Museum, curated by Billy Tang, Senior Curator of Rockbund Art Museum.The winner of the Award will be announced on November 6; the Award carries a stipend of RMB 300 000.

Since its inauguration in 2013, the “HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award” represents a network of multiregional and multidisciplinary partners from all over Asia. Throughout significant societal, economic and cultural changes in Asia, it has played a role in critical developments in contemporary art and exhibition projects in the region.

http://www.rockbundartmuseum.org/en/exhibition/overview/166crsn 

Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman, 28 Sep 2019 – 4 Jan 2020, Times Art Center Berlin

CURATED BY NIKITA YINGQIAN CAI AND XIAOYU WENG

Participating Artists: Chang Wen-Hsuan, Dachal Choi, Chitra Ganesh, Jane Jin Kaisen, Iris Kensmil, Sylbee Kim, Mai Ling, Laura Huertas Millán, Sara Modiano, Mai-Thu Perret, Thao Nguyen Phan, Arin Rungjang, Shen Xin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Wang Zhibo, Luka Yuanyuan Yang & Carlo Nasisse, Mia Yu

When Trinh T. Minh-ha published her significant text Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminismin 1989, some of the turbulent and transformative events of the world’s recent history were yet to happen, such as the end of the Cold War, the so-called East Asian Miracle, and the aggressive global expansion of identitarianism. But Minh-ha had already proposed a non-dualistic affirmation of women by stating: “The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics.”[i] And her criticism of the paradigms of Western academic discourses reads as radical and prophetic in today’s milieu of sociopolitical divisions. 

Inspired by Minh-ha’s belief in the empowerment of writing and storytelling, the exhibition concept of Neither Black / Red / Yellow nor Woman departs from an imaginary encounter between three Asian women artists: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), and Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952) in Paris sometime in 1979, and is informed by their works and archives. The stories of Yuliang, Theresa, and Minh-ha are exceptional stories about women who search for their voices as artists and struggle with their identity-impasse, while navigating through various cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. We question whether we could venture to say we are also Yuliang, Theresa, or Minh-ha, and whether there could have been empathy and resonance regardless of our different personal trajectories, cultural identifications, ideological positions, and understandings of gender.

The current crisis of identitarian politics manifests the antagonistic dichotomy that haunts our relationship with the past, present, and future, where life is often imagined in opposition and conflict. By retracing the transnational journeys of various female protagonists through the postcolonial memories before and after World War II and the regional chaos induced by ideological camps of the Cold War, we are able to see the reemergence of contradictory histories through the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc as paradoxes beyond the East/West divide. In view of curiosity and reflection, we envision the exhibition as a conversation that merges “them” with “us,” to speak in proximity with one another, and to form polyphony of cross-border storytellers. By juxtaposing historical materials with fictional constructs, we speculate beyond the categorization of gender and culture. Artists featured in this exhibition share a fluid state of mind and a diasporic mode of living and working. They respond to our questions with their own choices of conceptual personae and explore new dimensions of subjectivity and interrelation.

Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Womanis the first act of a trilogy that will unfold inthe future with multiple chapters in different institutions and geographies. The second act, The Mythic Being of Us,is inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s proposal to revive the collective usage of pronouns; humanistic portraits of woman poets, writers, filmmakers, activists, whistle-blowers, witches, gurus, ghosts, hackers, workers, and housewives will permeate the exhibition.The third act, Not a Manifesto but a Wish List,embraces solidarity while celebrating differences. A series of encounters will take place in performances and durational settings as in a theater or a parade, where poets, musicians, choreographers, and opera performers, among many others, are invited to take over the stage.

[i] Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 104.

https://www.timesartcenter.org/neither-black/red/yellow-nor-woman

Art Encounters Biennial 2019, September 20–October 27, 2019, Timișoara, Romania

For the third edition of The Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, a series of context-sensitive commissions will reflect on contemporary art as a form of understanding which, along with science, politics, literature, and philosophy, helps us tackle the complexity of life today. Curators Maria Lind and Anca Rujoiu will match artworks and practices with situations, locations, and questions, placing them alongside existing works embedded in the landscape and history of Timișoara. The Biennial’s name, Art Encounters, acts as further inspiration for discussion and reflection. Each artwork will be the product of encounters, and aims to stimulate debate between groups and individuals, both about and around the art. 

Over the course of this edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, different thoughts and ideas will flow through artworks and practices, influencing this part of the project. Similar to the winds in Herta Müller’s novels, which take place in and around Timișoara, the winds of the Biennial will bring different temperatures, atmospheres and even substances. Winds blow through borders and translations, something well known in Timișoara’s Banat region. Another wind drives an attentiveness to craft and the work of the hand. A third wind stimulates independent publishing, private collections, and forms of self-organisation.

A number of partnerships and other forms of collaboration are facilitating the Art Encounters Biennial 2019, which started in January and will continue until October 27. The Biennial exhibition will open on September 20, 2019. Leading up to this, a series of talks, workshops, and courses will take place as an integral part of the Biennial. The Biennial’s third edition continues the mission of engaging a wide audience in social debate, creating a vibrant platform for cultural exchange between the art scenes in Romania and those abroad, and exploring contact and conflict zones around individuals, groups, and contemporary art.

https://www.artencounters.ro/en/bienala/

Lyon Biennale, When Water Comes Together with Other Water, Fagor Factory, Lyon, France18 Sep 19 - 5 Jan 20

In 2019, the Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale is moving to the 29,000 sqm space of the former Fagor factory for the first time. This 15th edition is curated by the Palais de Tokyo, which has imagined the international exhibition as a vast landscape of uneven topography and unsettled climates.

Together the curators have envisioned this biennale as a vast ecosystem where artworks and artists cultivate the art of permaculture, at the intersection of landscapes be they biological (all interactions with living organisms, whether plants, animals or bacteria); economic (all interactions with resources and the appetites they entail: producing, distributing, consuming) and cosmogonic (all relations with the world’s spirit and our awareness of our place in the universe).

Around 50 artists of all generations and many nationalities, with gender parity, have been invited to make site-specific works that draw on the factory’s legacy and architecture as well as its own socio-economic context.

“Fantastic gardens, hybrid creatures, bouquets of epiphytic stories, synthetic fragrances and mythological machines, but also colours, crystals, songs and infrasounds which could be intended for us humans as much as for our contemporaries: plants, animals, minerals, breaths and chemistries, waves and bacteria, are just some of the ingredients that make up the porous landscapes of this 15th Lyon Biennale. This edition—a reflection of our collective curatorial approach, based on discussion and collegiality—seeks to nurture chance encounters and unexpected connections between artworks specially produced in collaboration with the vital forces of the metro area, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and the city of Lyon.”
Curatorial team.

https://www.biennaledelyon.com/en/

Where The Sea Remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, July 13 - October 12, 2019

Where The Sea Remembers is a project—comprised of an exhibition, a program series, and a website—that explores contemporary art in and about Vietnam through the practices of artists who live and work there and across its diasporas. This project marks the launch of an institutional initiative aimed at fostering exchanges and collaborations between The Mistake Room and independent peer institutions in Vietnam. The goal of this work is to create opportunities that cultivate and support an emerging generation of Vietnamese artists, writers, and curators in order to encourage the creation of scholarship that expands what we know about local and regional art histories and how we come to know it. 

 The result of ongoing conversations with artist friends and colleagues in Vietnam and others living elsewhere who are invested in the country’s artistic communities, Where The Sea Remembers is conceived as the starting point of an inquiry rather than its culmination. As such, it acknowledges and embraces its incompleteness in an attempt to re-imagine the function of the regionally-based exhibition format. Conscious that exhibitions have often throughout history been put to the service of nation-building, Where The Sea Remembers thinks of the nation not as a static geographic locale or even a diasporic imaginary but rather as a complex set of tense and evolving individual relationships between people and their ideas of a homeland. Thus, the artworks in the show and the contributions of program participants and commissioned writers are gathered as a dispatch of multiple perspectives rather than as a defining survey. 

 The project’s title is largely inspired by the name of a song widely known amongst people who fled Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975. Written by poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, Biển Nhớ, or The Sea Remembers, was often sung as a farewell by those staying behind in the refugee camps to those who were discharged and relocated. The song’s famous refrain, “Tomorrow you leave,” foregrounds the painful separation of exile, yet as scholar Yến Lê Espirituhas written, its invocation of a place—its mountains, sands, and willows—creates a bond that forever connects those who have gone to the lands they left behind. It is here, between the countries we knew and the homelands we choose to inhabit that Where The Sea Remembers locates a contemporary experience of nationhood. One that is always forged by partial choices, acts of distancing and affiliation, and creative tactics of world-making.

http://www.tmr.la/ewherethesearemembers

Sharjah Art Biennale 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah, UAE, 7 March — 10 June, 2019

Open from 7 March – 10 June 2019, Sharjah Biennial 14 (SB14) will showcase three unique exhibitions, curated by Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons.

SB14: Leaving the Echo Chamber
In popular culture, the ‘echo chamber’ is a moniker for circuitous news media and their attendant feeds, which are reinforced by a closed network controlled and governed by private sources, governments and corporations. It is also a metaphor for the historical dominance of capital and the cultural, social and political systems that dictate its access, production and distribution—this ‘capital’ wooing (and thus privileging) particular images, languages, skills, histories and geographies. Most tangibly, the ‘echo chamber’ is the space wherein sound hits and reverberates, where memory and imagination echo across surface, across space and across time. 

Leaving the Echo Chamber does not propose a ‘how to leave’ this context, but rather seeks to put into conversation a series of provocations on how one might renegotiate the shape, form and function of this chamber in order to move towards a multiplying of the echoes within, such vibrations representing the vast forms of human 
production—its rituals, beliefs and customs. The fourteenth edition of Sharjah Biennial begs the viewer to consider a number of concerns. What does it mean to demand alternate images at a time when news is spoon-fed to us by a monopoly of sources? How do we expand our narratives by acknowledging what has been hidden or removed? How can we reflect on our own culturally located histories in an era when so many individuals have been forced to believe that they must surrender their own agency to the mainstream forces that exist and govern our world?

The echo chamber could be construed as a modern-day Faraday cage—an enclosure that covers conductive material and prevents the transmission of signals. At Sharjah Biennial 14, artists are given the agency to tell stories that echo in different ways, thus creating new surfaces for a multiplicity of chambers that reveal numerous and multifaceted means of connecting, surviving and sustaining a collective humanity.

Leaving the Echo Chamber- Journey Beyond the Arrow
Curated by Zoe Butt
Journey Beyond the Arrow offers deeper context to the movement of humanity and the tools that have enabled or hindered its survival. From spiritual ritual to cultural custom, technological process to rule of law, all such practices employ objects and actions that continually move in voluntary and involuntary patterns of discovery, conquest, witness and exile across land and sea. 

However, the human journey surrounding the movement of these tools—its cause and effects, its feedback, its ‘echo’—clamors for collective sense amidst textbooks of little historical truth, online archives that are questionably fabricated and governmentally surveilled, and bureaucracies of academic systems of research and rigor that struggle to keep up with the pace of change in their assumed ‘D’isciplines.

In this exhibition, artists reveal the intergenerational impact of a range of physical and psychological ‘tools’, of how the representations and meanings of these tools have shifted as a consequence of colonial exploitation,social and religious conflict or ideological extremism. With their own distinctive approaches, the artists assembled here investigate the historical context of the ‘bow’, which reveals the ‘arrow’ of humanity’s echo—an echo of the diversity of all our activity in relation to language, memory, belief, ritual, and cultural and social practice. The artists’ imaginative retelling of our planet opens us up to what has been overlooked or lost in the echo chamber—a chamber that is economically intertwined yet governmentally divided, often culturally stymied by tradition and insidiously controlled by authoritarianism, a chamber that betrays us when we blindly participate in its algorithmic realm, which pursues quantity instead of meaning.

Journey Beyond the Arrow seeks to illuminate the necessity of exchange and diversity across the globe and throughout human history.

http://sharjahart.org/biennial-14/

Thao Nguyen Phan wins the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award 2018, in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró. 

www.hnfoundation.com 

The winner has been selected by a judging panel chaired by Han Nefkens, Founder of the Han Nefkens Foundation, and joined by Emilio Alvarez, Founding co-director of LOOP Barcelona, Marko Daniel, Director of the Fundació Joan Miró, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentine Galleries, and Barbara London, author, curator and professor.

Thao Nguyen Phan wins the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award for her heterogeneous and powerful works, which are unique, poetic forms of storytelling.

Established by the Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with LOOP Barcelona in 2018, the annual award aims to increase contemporary artistic production in the video art field by supporting artists of Asian origin or nationality.

Thao Nguyen Phan (1987, Vietnam) has unanimously been chosen as the winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award 2018 in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró. Promising young artist Thao Nguyen Phan has a great eye and, remarkably, for an artist of her age, she has found a voice that is both unique and incisive. Her diverse practice includes complex, layered narratives, which create a form of storytelling that is at once grounded in her local landscape and in the communities with whom she works, while at the same time referring back to fictional texts. She manages to blend the universal and the local in a poetic and visually powerful way. She is a great storyteller who executes her work in a highly professional manner. The jury feels that, at this moment in her career, Thao Nguyen Phan will be able to take full advantage of this opportunity by producing a new work that will without doubt further her career.

To Paint to Weave, Arete Museum, Manila, Nov 02 2018 - Jan 20 2019, in collaboration with Rags 2 Riches

https://thingsthatmatter.ph/blogs/joyfulstories/to-paint-to-weave-art-collaboration-thao-nguyen-phan-and-r2r

OPENING RECEPTION - 4:30 PM, November 2, 2018. EXHIBIT RUNS UNTIL JANUARY 20, 2019

"Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials" 

Anni Albers

The manifestation of to paint / to weave was heavily influenced by artist Thao Nguyen Phan's visit to Rags2Riches (R2R) and its artisan communities. However, its conception had begun long before this milestone trip. to paint / to weave is a series of watercolor paintings on Vietnamese silk, which depict women weaving in various forms.

Phan has been interested in local handicrafts specific to the region of South East Asia, the practices of which were formerly perceived as slow, now viewed as "the future of craftsmanship", with an emphasis on a collective effort towards a more sustainable mode of production and consumption. 

to paint / to weave is an artistic journey that attempts to bridge the mediums of painting and weaving. Regardless of their difference in form, functionality, and representation, they share many things in common: both actions are ancient and political. Both remind us of our early civilization, and are commercialized for their potential to be both sublimely beautiful and mundanely functional. To paint or to weave -- these gestures remind us why we create, collect, and admire the objects of our culture. 

About the artist

Thao Nguyen Phan is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses painting, installation, and moving images. Through literature, philosophy and daily life, Phan observes ambiguous issues in social convention, history and tradition. 

Phan has exhibited widely in Vietnam and abroad, with solo and group exhibitions at Gemaldegalerire, Berlin (2018); Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Factory Contemporary Art Centre, Ho Chi Minh City (2017); Nha San Collective, Hanoi (2017); Betonsalon, Paris (2016); among others. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka: Singapore Art Museum, Singapore and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and San Francisco. 

Phan participated in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative with mentor Joan Jonas (2016-2017) and has also completed residencies at Bottin Foundation, Santander, Spain (2016)

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2016) and San Art Laboratory artist-in-residence programme, Ho Chi Minh City (2013). She was awarded the grand prix of apb foundation signature art prize 2018, organized by Singapore Art Museum. 

In addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she is a co-founder of the collective Art Labor, which explores cross disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit the local community. 

Phan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with first class honors) from Lasalle College of Arts, Singapore (2009) and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013). She was born in 1987 in Ho Chi Minh City, where she continues to live and work. 

Areté & R2R

Sandbox School is the program under which Areté that provides residency-grants to student projects as well as capacity-building activities to different groups within and/or affiliated with the university. Because of their desire to engage with academics from the university and others that might be able to provide them with a different perspective of their business model, Ms. Reese Fernandez-Ruiz and R2R are offered a Sandbox School residency as an alumni group. 

As part of the Sandbox School residency, Areté will provide opportunities for Ms. Fernandez-Ruiz and R2R to not only offer their story and their processes as examples but also that which will be reappraised. Areté's interest in the collaboration beyond assisting the proponents is participating in the opportunity for a reimagined conversation about important principles and methods behind social entrepreneurship, community engagement, social development, and consequently, nation

Constructing Mythologies, Edouard Malingue gallery, Hongkong Sep 13 - Oct 18 2018

Curated by Caroline Ha Thuc

Every society is based on strong systems of belief that are part of our culture and daily lives. These beliefs become mythologies when they are constructed and nourished by a discourse – verbal or visual – generated and appropriated by the society we live in and by its system of communication.

This exhibition aims to explore the social construction of certain mythologies in Cambodia, China, Myanmar and Vietnam, in particular. These countries have deeply relied, and still do, on official narratives, developing and supporting fictional discourses in order to promote dominant State ideology and to obscure some parts of reality and history. Some mythologies thus serve specific political agendas while others are generated by collective beliefs – the global capitalist system, for instance – and grow and subsist beyond national boundaries. They can both invigorate society or limit its scope of expression. In response to these myths, art opposes its own fictional and independent discourses.

Everything can actually become a myth, everywhere: the five featured artists reflect on this ongoing dynamism that is constantly at work and shapes our vision of the world.

Truong Cong Tung and Khvay Samnang’s works are responding to each other. They question the encounter between two opposite mythologies that cohabit in rural areas in Southeast Asia. These lands are often the territory of sacred places and spirits, the cradle for mythical and traditional beliefs transmitted by diverse ethnic minorities who have been living there for centuries in harmony with nature. Today, with the intensive exploitation of land and rapid deforestation, traditions are waning and these ancient beliefs are threatened. However, they seem to be somehow replaced by another set of beliefs based on the rhetoric of modernity and prosperity, built by the State and by private development companies.

Truong’s installation and sculptures embody this cultural confrontation, combining hybrid found objects made of newly sacralised elements and natural parts, mingling local cosmologies with imposed technologies. His work is deeply informed by the traditional values of his native region of the Central Highlands in Vietnam.

Khvay’s video and masks are the outcome of the artist’s quasi-ethnographic encounter with the Cambodian Chong community, an ethnic minority living in the Areng Valley and known as one of Southeast Asia’s last great wilderness areas. Together with choreographer Rady Nget, the artist reflects on the animist beliefs of this population magnifying the empowerment and agency of a nature endowed with its own interiority and subjectivity.  Their representation somehow echoes the myth of a Golden Age when harmony existed between nature and all creatures, a discourse reactivated today in resistance to ecological threats and the contemporary breakup with nature.

Born to an Indian-Burmese family, Maung Day, who is both poet and artist, scrutinises the official Burmese discourse aimed at excluding minorities and fostering violence, exploring in particular the dark side of the Buddhist belief system in Myanmar.  In this series of new drawings, he hints at the institutionalisation of Buddhism by the Burmese military State and emphasises how the religion has become an instrument of its ultranationalist policies used to activate and justify violence. The ancient Buddhist tales have henceforth been diverted and stripped of all their meaningful content. Leaving all interpretations open, the artist proposes his own absurd mythologies.

Thao Phan-Nguyen’s response to political mythologies and beliefs is a set of poetic tales based on her artistic and free interpretation of history and popular stories. The time and place of her video are fictive but the work refers to the agrarian reforms that took place in Vietnam in the 1950s and to the Romanisation of written Vietnamese by French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. The tone of the video and the style of her drawings are falsely naïve: beyond political utopias and dreamlike aspirations lies the reign of manipulation, dictatorship and cruelties.

These ambiguities and tensions feature also in the paintings by Chinese artist Wang Zhibo whose work remains on the edge between fiction and reality. Reaching reality is actually just another mythology since beliefs and reality are constantly and tightly entwined. The Chinese painter addresses these complex issues with her usual sense of humour against the backdrop of a ubiquitous system of power.

https://edouardmalingue.com/exhibitions/constructing-mythologies/

Thao Nguyen Phan wins grand prize at apb foundation signature art prize 2018 

quoted the Straits Times

https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/vietnamese-artist-phan-thao-nguyen-wins-60000-signature-art-prize

SINGAPORE - Vietnamese artist Phan Thao Nguyen has won the grand prize of $60,000 at the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize, a triennial award organised by the Singapore Art Museum and sponsored by the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation. Phan's installation of videos and oil paintings titled Tropical Siesta imagines a village populated only by children.

Three other awards were announced today (June 29) at the awards ceremony at the National Museum of Singapore, attended by Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Grace Fu.

Singapore artist Shubigi Rao, took home a $15,000 juror's choice award for her film-and-print installation on destroyed libraries, Pulp: A Short Biography Of The Banished Book. Vol I: Written In The Margins (2014-2016). Another $15,000 juror's choice award was given to Thai artist Thasnai Sethaseree's paper collage on monk robes, Untitled (Hua Lamphong).

Indonesian artist Gede Mahendra Yasa's detailed acrylic painting, After Paradise Lost #1, won the $10,000 people's choice award by receiving the most votes from visitors. The 51-year-old artist was not present at the ceremony.

All 15 works of art shortlisted for the prize are on display at the museum until Sept 2.

The Signature Art Prize was launched in 2008 by the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation and the Singapore Art Museum to recognise outstanding examples of contemporary art from emerging and established artists in the Asia-Pacific region. This year, the field was enlarged to include Central Asia.

There were 113 nominated works from 46 territories.

Jurors included Ms Mami Kataoka, chief curator of Tokyo's Mori Art Museum; Mr Bose Krishnamachari, president of the Kochi Biennale Foundation; Ms Joyce Toh, head of content and senior curator at the Singapore Art Museum; Dr Gerard Vaughan, who is director of the National Gallery of Australia; and artist and independent curator Wong Hoy Cheong.

The final selections were based on criteria including strength of the idea and concept; creative use of medium, material and technique; artistic insight and interpretation; and originality of artwork.

Tropical Siesta reimagines rural Vietnam as described by a French Jesuit missionary in the 17th century. Child actors are captured in farming work as well as re-enactments of a folktale. Jurors praised the "poetic" style of the work. Ms Toh called Nguyen "a powerful, poignant storyteller".

She added: "Sensuously visual, the film pulls the viewer into its enigmatic world - a world governed entirely by children. Even as it explores a number of complex issues in Vietnamese history, the work feels fresh and very much alive."

A Beast, a God and a Line. Art, religion, and woven knowledge in today's asia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, July 20 - Oct 07 2018 

"A Beast, a God, and a Line" is an invitation to take a look at contemporary history from the perspective of Asia and the Pacific in this moment of global uncertainty and a crumbling of the western order that dominated for centuries. The show’s artists pose courageous questions and thoughtfully explore the new, fragmented reality of our world today. 

Participating artists:

Nabil Ahmed, Anida Yoeu Ali, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Daniel Boyd, Sarat Mala Chakma, Chandrakanth Chitara, Rashid Choudhury, Christy Chow, Cian Dayrit, Ines Doujak, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Simryn Gill, Sheela Gowda, Garima Gupta, Taloi Havini, Huang Rui, Dilara Begum Jolly, Jrai Dew Collective (curated by Art Labor), Jaffa Lam, Jiun-Yang Li, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Idas Losin, Lavanya Mani, Moelyono, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Manish Nai, Sarah Naqvi, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Nontawat Numbenchapol, Jimmy Ong, Anand Patwardhan, Etan Pavavalung, Paul Pfeiffer, Thao-Nguyen Phan, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Joydeb Roaja, Norberto Roldan, Zamthingla Ruivah, Ampannee Satoh, Chai Siris, Praneet Soi, Simon Soon (with RJ Camacho and Celestine Fadul), Than Sok, Su Yu Hsien, Truong Công Tùng, Raja Umbu, Chiara Vigo, Munem Wasif, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ming Wong, Lantian Xie, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Trevor Yeung, Tuguldur Yondonjamts

"A Beast, a God, and a Line" exhibition has been organised by Para Site, Dhaka Art Summit and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The show debuted in Bangladesh during the Dhaka Art Summit in February 2018 and was shown at Para Site Hong Kong March – May and at TS1 Yangon in June.

https://artmuseum.pl/en/wystawy/bestia-bog-i-linia/1

Second Yinchuan biennale, June 09 - Sep 19 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan, China 

Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge
Second Yinchuan Biennale
June 9–September 19, 2018

Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan 
www.moca-yinchuan.com 

Entitled Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge, the Second Yinchuan Biennale will open on June 9, 2018, at the MOCA Yinchuan. Under the artistic direction of Marco Scotini, the Yinchuan Biennale is pleased to announce the curatorial team composed of Andris Brinkmanis, Paolo Caffoni, Zasha Colah, and Lu Xinghua.

Conceived with the aim of measuring itself against a specific geo-historic context, and proposed as a form of minor language within the biennale system, Starting from the Desert seeks to respond to contemporary urgencies (not only in China) by adopting an "archaeological method." Northwest China is still considered a remote corner, but one which, owing to the historic Silk Road, has been defined through time as a place of great flows, hybridizations and exchange of people, knowledge, languages, technologies, religions, animals, spices and goods.

In relation to the possibility of reducing the Eurasian continent to simple geo-economics, which could well be implied in current large-scale projects, the Second Yinchuan Biennale seeks to read the modalities of "group-being" at the crossroad of heterogeneous components, as indispensable to a new ecology that intends to emancipate all forms of life. In search for eco-logics as a new paradigm of transversal thought, the Second Yinchuan Biennale attempts not to reduce these elements to subject matter, but to utilize them in order to question the limits of the exhibition format, and thus to eventually produce a new eco-model of exhibiting.

The Biennale’s framework is articulated over four, interdependent (and often overlapping) thematic areas that, without seeking to limit or circumscribe, attempts to visualize their material and immaterial aspects. In the same way, these areas try to question the contradictions of the dualistic systems that have accompanied the rise of Modernity and Capital, positioning them as limits to the realization of an ecosocial program for our time.

Nomadic Space and Rural Space is concerned with the interaction of the physical environment with forms of life. It proposes less the different natures of the two spatial types, than their reciprocal intersections. Labor-in-Nature and Nature-in-Labor focuses on forces of production（paid or unpaid）and on the relations of production (appropriation, exploitation, accumulation) linked to modern ideas of nature. The Voice and The Bookintervenes at the level of mental ecology deconstructing the opposition between phonemes and graphemes, orality and writing, questioning the production and reproduction of knowledge. Minorities and Multiplicity discusses associations and the associative forms of living beings: from the micro-social to the institutional scale.

With newly commissioned works alongside ancient artistic relics from public museums and private collections, the Second Yinchuan Biennale has selected the 90 participating artists from over thirty regions, paying particular attention to the western borders of China (from Mongolia to Central and Southeast Asia) in a way that is consistent with the exhibition’s geo-political, investigative methods. Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edgeannounces its final list of artists.

Ravi Agarwal, Vyacheslav Akhunov, Navjot Altaf, Can Altay, Nazgol Ansarinia, Arahmaiani and Wukir Suryadi, Said Atabekov, Baatarzorig Batjargal, Sammy Baloji, Massimo Bartolini, Felice Beato, Erick Beltrán, Alighiero Boetti, Nomin Bold, Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining), Filipa César, Sheba Chhachhi, Nikhil Chopra, Emory Douglas, Duan Zhengqu, Enkhbold Togmidshiirev, Peter Fend, Mariam Ghani, Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, Piero Gilardi, Shiva Gor, Raphaël Grisey, Grupo Suma, Salima Hashmi, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Hiwa K, Ho Rui An, Huxian Peasant Painters (Chen Jianchun, Du Zhilian, Jiaoxi Culture Station, Li Fenglan, Li Naiti, Liu Huisheng, Ma Zhenlong, Wang Zhenying), Saodat Ismailova, Joris Ivens, Francesco Jodice, Alimjan Jorobaev, Kan Xuan, Muratbek Kasmalieva & Gulnara Djumaliev, Kimsooja, Li Juchuan, Li Binyuan, Liu Ding, Juan Pablo Macías, Taus Makhacheva, Mao Chenyu, Mao Tongqiang, Helen Mirra, Adrien Missika, Tina Modotti, Moataz Nasr, Pedro Neves Marques, Nils Norman, Uriel Orlow, Prabhakar Pachpute, Kyong Park, Gianni Pettena, Thao-Nguyen Phan, Justin Ponmany, Marjetica Potrč, Leang Seckon, Tsherin Sherpa, Karan Shrestha, Song Dong, Demetrio Stratos, Alexander Ugay, u-ra-mi-li (Iswar Srikumar & Anushka Meenakshi), Wang Sishun, Wang Wei, Penba Wangdu, WUXU Group, Xu Tan, Xu Bing, Yang Kailin, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Zai Tang, Katarina Zdjelar, Robert Zhao Renhui, Zheng Bo, Zhuang Hui

APB Foundation Signature Art Prize, venue partner National Museum of Singapore, May 25 - Sep 02 2018

25 May – 2 September 2018

Inaugurated in 2008 by the Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) Foundation and the Singapore Art Museum, the triennial APB Foundation Signature Art Prize returns for its fourth edition in 2018. Recognising outstanding examples of contemporary art from both emerging and established artists over the previous three years, the prize puts the spotlight on the most compelling, cogent and complex works of art from the Asia-Pacific rim to the region of Central Asia.

The APB Foundation Signature Art Prize is worth SGD 100,000, with SGD 60,000 awarded to the Grand Prize winner and SGD 15,000 each to two Jurors’ Choice Award winners. A People’s Choice Award of SGD 10,000 will also be offered to the work that receives the highest number of public votes on-site.

The 15 finalists of the 2018 installment will be announced by early 2018, and the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize finalist exhibition will take place from 25 May to 2 September 2018 at the National Museum of Singapore, venue partner for the Prize. The awards ceremony will take place on 29 June 2018.

https://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/exhibitions/upcoming.html

http://nationalmuseum.sg/our-exhibitions/exhibition-list/signature-art-prize?sc_lang=en

Galeria, May 20 2018 onwards at the Factory Contemporary Art centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam  

Selected paintings from Phan Thảo Nguyên’s haunting and alluring watercolor series ‘Voyage de Rhodes’, together with pieces from her body of sculptures ‘Your daughter is a traitor (Magical bow)’, will again grace our summer Galeria (starting from 20 May onwards). Forming part of her solo exhibition ‘Poetic Amnesia’ (showcased at The Factory 15 Apr – 2 June 2017), these works reflect Thảo Nguyên’s longtime fascination with how and why the Vietnamese language was given a Romanized script, a history the artist uses to project her imagined world, a memory re-called or entirely made anew. Dancing across the walls in the back room are Đạt Vũ’s photographs from of his ongoing project ‘Muted Conversations’ (first shown in an exhibition of the same name at The Factory 10 Aug – 15 Sept 2017). Taken during Đat’s extensive travels throughout the country, these (sur)real images show how local people, across diverse regions, perform rites and rituals in sacred spaces and in daily life; in public and in private; and how they incorporate and maintain these traditional spiritual practices in the constant flux of changes between historical heritage and new influences from contemporary life.

The Factory operates as a social enterprise, whereby all profit from sale of art and business on the property supports the running costs of its art-related programs. For more information, please contact the reception desk or call the hotline: +84 (0) 283 744 2589.

http://factoryartscentre.com/en/galeria-may-onwards/

Joan Jonas and Thao Nguyen Phan, Rolex Mentor and Protégé in Visual Arts, 2016-2017

Thao Nguyen Phan interview for Post Vidai contemporary art collection 

Phan Thao Nguyen shares her thoughts behind her works in the Post Vidai Vietnamese contemporary art collection

A Beast, a God and a Line, Para Site, Hongkong, Mar 17 - May 20, 2018  

Opening Reception
March 16, 2018
7:00 – 9:00pm
Para Site
22/F, 6/F Wing Wah Industrial Building

Nabil Ahmed, Anida Yoeu Ali, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Au Hoi Lam, Pablo Bartholomew, Daniel Boyd, Sarat Mala Chakma, Rashid Chowdhury, Christy Chow, Cian Dayrit, Ines Doujak, Gauri Gill, Simryn Gill, Sheela Gowda, Garima Gupta, Taloi Havini, Su Yu Hsien, Dilara Begum Jolly, Jrai Dew Collective (curated by Art Labor), Jaffa Lam, Jiun-Yang Li, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Idas Losin, Lavanya Mani, Moelyono, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Manish Nai, Sarah Naqvi, Nguyen, Trinh Thi, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Nontawat Numbenchapol, Jimmy Ong, Etan Pavavalung, Paul Pfeiffer, Thao-Nguyen Phan, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Joydeb Roaja, Norberto Roldan, Zamthingla Ruivah, Ampannee Satoh, Chai Siris, Praneet Soi, Simon Soon (with RJ Camacho and Celestine Fadul), Truong Công Tùng, Raja Umbu, Chiara Vigo, Munem Wasif, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ming Wong, Lantian Xie, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Trevor Yeung, Tuguldur Yondonjamts

Para Site is delighted to present A beast, a god, and a line. This expansive travelling exhibition is co-produced with the Samdani Art Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and is woven through the connections and circulations of ideas across a region. This geography - arbitrary as any mapping, not least as it appears in contemporary art exhibitions - is commonly called the Asia-Pacific, but it could also be epitomised by several other definitions, which the exhibition explores and untangles. Overlapping and sometimes conflicting or barely discernible beneath the strident layers of contemporaneity, and the modern waves of destruction, these worlds are still the pillars of a region that is going through a process of replacing its colonial cartographic coordinates, a process this exhibition proudly serves. It does so by putting forward political, art historical, and aesthetic interrogations, all of them reflected in the subject matters of the exhibition, as well as in the aesthetic languages it gathers, and in the art historical narratives around the featured artists, who all belong to vastly different generations and backgrounds. 

http://www.para-site.org.hk/en/exhibitions/a-beast-a-god-and-a-line

Poetic Amnesia, Rolex Art Weekend, 3-4 February 2018, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin 

http://artsweekend.rolexmentorprotege.com/