Published as commentary on new acquisitions of the FRAC Grand Large collection, Dunkerque, 2026.
Phan is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice ranges from drawing and painting to video and multi-media installations. Her work includes research on routes and biographies related to colonial ties between Vietnam and France. As co-founder of the collective Art Labor, Phan is engaged in a long-term collaboration with local Jrai communities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
After studying lacquer painting at the Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts, Phan completed a BA in Fine Arts at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore in 2009 and graduated with an MA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014.
Major solo shows include Le Soleil Tombe Sans Un Bruit at Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2025 and Reincarnations of Shadows at Pirelli HangarBiccoca, Milan in 2023. Phan has participated in numerous international group shows, such as the Dhaka Art Summit in 2023 and the Venice Biennal in 2022.
By combining not only various media formats but including different voices from a not-so-distant past, Phan`s work collaborates in many ways and with many protagonists. Be it Le Corbusier`s modernist legacy in Southeast Asia, ethnographic research trips of French missionaries to this region, or the work of modern artist Diem Phung Thi between France and Vietnam – Phan weaves a web of diverse contributors from different temporal layers, often in-between places. Respective perspectives across art, architecture, design and literature, have largely been influenced by colonial power relations. While acknowledging the violent imbalance of such ties, they reveal mutual processes of learning and transformation at times.
As part of the collective Art Labor, Phan has established a long-term collaboration with the Jrai community in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. In the course of her research, the artist came across the publications of French missionary Jacques Dournes (1922–1993), who has lived in the region from 1955 to 1969. A series of Phan`s works does not only share its title Forêt, femme, folie with Dournes` personal account (published in 1978) on his years among the Jrai. Moreover, the artist`s dual-slide projection and several watercolors take the missionary`s b/w photographs, diary notes and drawings as point of departure. The particular projection format resembles an academic presentation standard of the 20th century – a standard that once helped to establish potentially violent distinctions between humans and non-humans, culture and nature, the civilized and the wild.
Portraits, nudes, rites, landscapes, flowers. On the one hand, Dournes` photographs indicate an exoticizing and, in some cases, sexualizing gaze. On the other hand, his close view of every-day-life scenes and rituals suggest a particular attachment with the locals. Details of daily lives such as weaving or a scene of destroyed jars, originally employed in Jrai funerary practices, shows a sensibility for certain conditions of living. Phan`s dual-slide projection combines reproductions of her own watercolors alongside the original photographic sources. Painted after scenes depicted by Dournes, brush strokes take up gestures and landscapes but also add layers of color and text, animals and plants or leave blank spaces. As part of the slide projection and as separate presentation on paper, the watercolors open a field of exploration how images are being formed through time, memory, and narrative. Non-human forces like plants, a fire, or animals seem to act as agents in respective scenes.
By way of painting after the anthropological notes of a French missionary in 20th century Vietnam, the artist re-appropriates a European male gaze and its more or less implicit hierarchies – albeit not without ambivalence. Phan`s way of rapprochement both to the colonial history of her home country and to the Jrai community, points to a multi-layered temporality of such encounters today.
Works
Forêt, femme, folie n°05, 2024
Forêt, femme, folie n°07, 2024
Forêt, femme, folie n°08, 2024
Watercolor and digital print on paper
29,7 x 21 cm each
Forêt, Femme, Folie, 2025
Slide projection
Variable dimensions, 6 minutes
Selected bibliography
Fondazione HangarBicocca/Aspesi, Lucia/Griccioli, Fiammetta (ed.), Thao Nguyen Phan : Reincarnations of Shadows, Venice: Marsilio Arte, 2023
Nguyen Phan, Thao/Fundación Joan Miró/Han Nefkens Foundation (ed.), Monsoon Melody, Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2019