Thao Nguyen Phan

2014-ongoing

Education of a Poet’ is set in a fictional school named after Alexandre de Rhodes (1591 – 1660), a French Jesuit missionary popularly believed to be the father of ‘Chữ Quốc Ngữ’ (the Romanized alphabetical writing system now officially used in Vietnam). In these oil paintings, the artist imagines the student actions of this fictional school, illustrating them in particular pose - reading, playing games or wearing a blindfold. The semi-abstract images are rooted in the artist’s interest in ophthalmology (the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eye), which is an extension of her fascination in how society ‘sees’ and understands the order of the world. 

Phan is drawn to the study of reality as a collection of stories and artifacts in fragments, as categories conceived as patterns and diagrams. In much the same way that the Vietnamese language borrows from the Chinese and French lexicons, the telling of history as a fragmentation of near-fictions also compels Phan. Her paintings reflect her own remnants of reality which embrace poetry, colonial affect, educational idioms and conflicts in perception, like a painted jigsaw puzzle that is yet to be given its own border.

Text by Zoe Butt

https://paddle8.com/work/phan-thao-nguyen/39954-the-illiterates-from-education-of-a-poet-series

Phan Thao Nguyen uses religious belief as a starting point to trace the history of modern Vietnamese script, a Romanized alphabet system supposedly first introduced in the 17th century by Alexandre de Rhodes – a French Jesuit missionary – as an alterative writing system to the traditional pictographic character. Thao Nguyen creates her own imagined school named after de Rhodes, of which the curriculum is a place to experiment the belief: in the un-seeable, the poetic and the beautiful. In this obscure school, where everyone is blindfolded, she showcases blindness and illiteracy as the real obstacles of learning for pupil and teacher. She asks what justifies belief when there is no literacy and knowledge, but only poetry and beauty?

Text by Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran

http://san-art.org/exhibition/unconditional-belief/

2015- (discontinued)

This project is a year-long collaboration between the artist and a fisherwoman. One is raised in the city after “Doi Moi" (Renovation[1]), one was born in a poor fishing village during the Vietnam war. For the last 30 years, she does the odd job of salvaging dead bodies in the river and the ocean. Doing this dangerous task with just bare hands and simple equipment, she has salvaged more than 500 bodies.

According to Buddhist belief, death of drowning is unjust death, therefore the soul of the dead cannot be reincarnated. Vietnamese myths say that people who do salvaging bodies job will have a hard life, because they steal the water god’s food. Daughter of the Water God dives into the life of a particular woman in order to navigate the blurring boundaries between myth and reality, between death and reunion. The result will be a multimedia installation that combines fictional elements and documentary video.

[1]

Đổi Mới (English: Renovation) is the name given to the economic reforms initiated in Vietnam in 1986 with the goal of creating a  'Socialist-oriented market economy" 

Site specific installation

2012-2014

A kidney stone, also known as a renal calculus (from the Latin ren, “kidney” and calculus, “pebble”) is a solid concretion or crystal aggregation formed in the kidneys from dietary minerals in the urine.

This stone stayed in an anonymous Vietnamese man’s body for more than a decade and was the reason for his endless pain. The stone, which had become an inseparable part of him, finally was removed from his body in 2012.

On a random occasion he showed me the picture of the stone, something he treated as precious and fragile. It was unusually large for a kidney stone. I imagined all the pain he had to endure, which filled me up with empathy. However, he seemed to be proud of it. Looking at the picture, for me it was like love at first sight. Suddenly I wanted to encounter the stone in person. I convinced him to send me the stone from his home in Vietnam to my place in America. I thought the stone would not be able to come to America because its origin was suspicious. If I listed it as a “kidney stone” on the declaration form from the Vietnamese post office, the stone would not be able to depart. So we thought of a tactic.  He labeled the kidney stone as a “souvenir rock” and displayed it in an ordinary gift box.

The stone, with its new identity as a souvenir, arrived to America in the month of November. While crossing the borders, the stone traveled further than its owner ever had. Once the stone arrived to America, thinking of the stone as a new immigrant, I decided to return it to its true identity. It is no longer a souvenir, but a kidney stone.

2012 

Video Installation

35 minutes, color,  sound. Twin mattress, corsage pins, projection

This work explores the concept of pain and beauty. The mattress is a typical object found in every modern house. It is an experiential place of longing and sleeping. The mattress also relates to the Freudian concept of the unconscious, where most of our dreams happen. It is the home of the night, where our mind wanders. Traces of love, fantasy, pain and imagination take place, free from the constraints of social, cultural, political boundaries. No one can censor our dreams.

Growing up in Vietnam, I used to sleep on straw mat. When first sleeping on a mattress, I felt pain in my body for months. Sleeping on a new mattress is like wearing someone else’s clothes, where the trace of our bodies and the feeling of home are missed. The pain I have is similar to the placement of this up-side-down mattress, which provokes a sensation of displacement and confusion that is Kafkaesque. In this piece, I violate the protective nature of the mattress by covered it up with a layer of tear-drop shape pins and hang it from the ceiling.

 A video is projected on top of the mattress, displaying repetitive action performed by a white man in a formal suit, meticulously pinning the mattress. The video represents the moment of suspension that is vulnerable, performative and cinematic. Listening to the sound of pinning the mattress, my mind is stimulated by its repetitiveness. Similar to the sound of a clock at night, however, the sound of the mattress being pinned is fragile and irregular, its beat is probably is closer to heartbeats, something we can hear and feel but cannot control.

 A twin mattress is an isolated island, a single person’s world. In this place, its surface becomes a projection screen, a canvas for our body, the object of longing and endless journey of sleep, an action that we will continue to the rest of our life.

Installation. Pork, glass table, chair and photograph.