“I grew up in a Buddhist family,” Thao Nguyen Phan says of her childhood in Vietnam. “Even though the religion here seems to emphasise peace and mindfulness, the land is turbulent, there is always conflict, and the environmental impact on the river has been very dramatic.” The Mekong, a vast river that extends from the Tibetan plateau through to the delta in Vietnam, about an hour’s drive from Ho Chi Minh City where Phan was born and lives today, is the source of the artist’s exhibition at Tate St Ives. A collection of dream-like films, paintings and installations, it serves as a ballad …for a wounded waterway.
As a child in the 1990s, Phan listened to folk songs that glorified the transformation of the Mekong “from a jungle with crocodiles and wildlife” to “a rich place for human habitation and rice cultivation”. But the disastrous effects of industrialisation over the past decade led her “to question these stereotypical views of the river”. After graduating from art school in Chicago in 2014, Phan became a protege of the revered American video and performance artist Joan Jonas, and has been exhibiting internationally since. In response to the unfolding ecological crisis, Phan has created her own melancholy folklore.
Her films issue stark warnings about the dangers of exploiting the natural world for personal gain. There are tales of children killed by burst hydro-dams, footage of heavy rainfall and plastic waste, and an ominous retelling of a Khmer folk story about a spoilt emperor’s daughter who tires of gold and demands a necklace made from morning dew. As punishment, the girl dissolves into the river.
Phan explains her technique of blending factual, fictional and folkloric sources as a reaction to the unreliability of state-approved narratives: “In Vietnam, because we are a socialist country, there is a tendency to rewrite what happened.” Her film Mute Grain focuses on the 1945 famine. Under Japanese occupation, farmers were forced to replace edible crops with jute to make military equipment, contributing to the starvation of millions. Mute Grain combines the testimonies of famine survivors, a fictional tale of two siblings, March and August, and watercolour animations of healthy children transposed on to documentary photographs of the malnourished and dead.
Nguyen has also created her own memorial: an installation of hanging jute stalks that chime as you walk among them. The work, she says, “is a lullaby, like a folk song that you sing for children to put them to sleep peacefully”.
Despite the abundance of sorrow, Phan hopes that “the audience can see the beauty and optimism amid these seemingly tragic stories”. That optimism stems from the power of storytelling to commune with the ghosts of the past, and imagine alternative futures: “For me, the spirit of cinema is sometimes haunting, and sometimes has the ability to transform, reincarnate into the next life.” The siblings in Mute Grain are also the subjects of ethereal silk paintings that depict a world free from famine or ecological ruin. Here, the children are alive and well, riding mopeds, picking plentiful rice crops and dancing among the flowers.
Magic and loss: four artworks
The Flower, 2016
“These light sculptures are found objects: they originally decorated the streets of Vietnam during Tet, the lunar new year celebrations. The sunflower and bird shapes recall traditional Vietnamese symbols of harmony, prosperity and longevity. They also reference the symbols used in state propaganda, such as the sunflower.”
Dream of March and August, 2018–ongoing
“This series of paintings depicts the parallel worlds of March and August [characters in the film Mute Grain, about the 1945 famine]. March and August are siblings – however, August died during the famine and became a hungry ghost. While March looks in vain for memories of his sister, they somehow meet here in a dream-like world.”
First Rain, Brise Soleil, 2021
“[The film] seeks to reveal the historical and current violence and the destruction that occurs in the Mekong region; it proposes a gentler kind of modernity that shows respect to the poetry and lyricism of indigenous knowledge and our ecosystem.”
No Jute Cloth for the Bones, 2019
“For me, the unwrapped jute stalks become bare bones – without skin, without flesh, without coverage or protection. As the suspended jute moves and sways, it clatters and rustles. The sound is a lullaby dedicated to lives lost and the separation between the living and the dead, who are unable to reconcile due to the tragedies of war and famine.”
Thao Nguyen Phan’s exhibition is at Tate St Ives, Cornwall, to 2 May.
