Thao Nguyen Phan
Reincarnations of Shadows
Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

Thao Nguyen Phan’s works are at once beautiful and devastating, their harrowing stories poetically revealed like emotional gut punches. And one is struck by the extent of the tragedy and the burning shame at knowing almost none of it. Phan asks us to consider why it is that certain events in history are glorified while others are hardly mentioned, if at all. Who gets to determine what is dutifully preserved in archives and what is overlooked, erased altogether? Where should we turn to if we want to uncover more complex truths?

Take Mute Grain (2019), her hypnotic three-channel black-and-white video on view at her solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, which focuses on the 1945 famine of the Red River Delta in Japanese-occupied north Vietnam, estimated to have killed two million people, largely due to gross mismanagement and negligence of the competing French and Japanese administrations. Phan combines archival photography with testimonies of survivors, as well as a fictionalized account of two siblings, in order to illuminate this effectively erased history of collective trauma. The emaciated bodies in grainy photographs are overlaid with momentary watercolors of healthy, happy children, briefly granted a new life, reincarnated before vanishing. These are interspersed with the fable of a brother, March, and his ghost sister, August, as they attempt to reunite against a backdrop of lush rural landscapes amid the sound of the wind and the birds as lights radiate around them.