VietNamNet Bridge - The first solo exhibition by Phan Thao Nguyen entitled “Poetic Amnesia” will be held at Nha San Collective, 15th floor, Hanoi Creative City Building, 01 Luong Yen, Hanoi from December 14 to 24. 

“Poetic Amnesia” is an experimentation in creating a half-real and half-fictitious visual experience, in which the viewer embodies the role of Tu Thuc [1]. 

Upon entering the exhibition, they will journey through the sphere of the artwork, where boundaries between real time and fictional time, real space and fantastical space become distorted.

“Poetic Amnesia” is a venture into a figment of Vietnamese history, one that deals with the history of Vietnam’s romanized script (chu quoc ngu), and both the fantasies and the hard facts entailed. 

As Nguyen feels about for 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 My Chau and Trong Thuy romance tale, as a metaphor for the love-hate relationship spanning thousands of generations between Vietnam and China. 

Inspired by these historical sources, Nguyen allows herself to lift her feet off the ground, to tweak, to affix information and feelings in order to express perception of the multifacetedprocesses of archiving, altering, erasing, revising and reconstructing human memory and symbolic consciousness.

Phan Thao Nguyen (b. 1987. Ho Chi Minh City) graduated from Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts in 2009. Four years later she received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). 

Today, in addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she has joined forces with artist Truong Cong Tung and curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Trần to form Art Labor. This collective explores cross-disciplinary practices and develops art projects that will benefit the local community. 

Nguyen is expanding her “theatrical fields”, including what she calls ‘performance gesture’ and moving images. She has exhibited widely in Southeast Asia and is a 2016-2017 Rolex Protégée, mentored by internationally acclaimed, New York-based, performance and video artist, Joan Jonas.

[1] Tu Thuc is a Tran dynasty’s mythical figure mentioned in Nguyen Du’s chronicle Truyen ky man luc (Collection of Strange Tales). The fictitious Tu Thuc is an ordinary man who encounters a fairy, they get married and live together in the fairyland. Upon returning to the ordinary world, he realizes that everything – from time to people to landscapes – have changed. Legend has it that the encounter took place in present day Tu Thuc cave.

PV