Thao Nguyen Phan, “Poetic Amnesia nº22”
Watercolor on paper
2017
30.5 x 23cm
(unframed)
The “Poetic Amnesia” series is a venture into a figment of Vietnamese history, one that deals with the history of “chu quoc ngu” (Vietnam’s Romanized script), and both the fantasies and the hard facts entailed. As Thao Nguyen Phan feels about the remaining traces of “chu quoc ngu”’s celebrated father (the French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes), fate brought her to Rome where she was able to read Bento Thien’s handwritten letter to Giovanni Filippo de Marini. In the letter, he recounted Annam’s history through a series of myths, including the Mỵ Châu and Trọng Thuỷ romance tale, as a metaphor for the love-hate relationship spanning thousands of generations between Vietnam and China. Inspired by these historical sources, Thao Nguyen allows herself to lift her feet off the ground, to tweak, to affix information and feelings in order to express her own perception of the multifacetedness of the processes of archiving, altering, erasing, revising, and reconstructing human’s memory and their symbolic consciousness.
Thao Nguyen Phan´s work reflects her social concerns, but is also how she expresses her faith in the visual language and its capacity to acknowledge the past, an awareness that would enable us to live peacefully in our present and consolidate our future.
Trained as a painter, Thao Nguyen is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses video, painting and installation. Drawing from literature, philosophy, and daily life, she observes ambiguous issues in social conventions and history. She started working in film when she began her MFA in Chicago.
Thao Nguyen Phan exhibits internationally, with solo and group exhibitions including The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (Venice, 2022); Kunstverein (Hamburg, 2021); New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, 2020); Chisenhale gallery (London, 2020); WIELS (Brussels, 2020); Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2019); Lyon Biennale (Lyon, 2019); Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2019); Gemäldegalerie (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) ; and Bétonsalon (Paris, 2016), among others. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. In addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she is co-founder of the collective Art Labor, which explores cross-disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit the local community. Thao Nguyen is expanding her “theatrical fields”, including what she calls performance gesture and moving images. She is a 2016-2017 Rolex Protégée, mentored by internationally acclaimed, New York-based, performance and video artist, Joan Jonas.
She lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
