The Brooklyn Rail

Finding guidance. Seeking solace. Wanting to leave a mark. Hoping to be remembered. Crafting stories. Carving memory. Shaping legacies. Layering time. And all the while wondering who is watching, listening, sensing the artistic contemplations you have put forth in the world. Extending gratitude to those who once walked and talked and fought the world in all its assumptions, taking delight in the personal commitment you feel you share to a language that is both yours, and then not yours.

These personal reflections follow my conversation with artist Thao Nguyen Phan (b. 1987), who recently shared her journey in finding and recalling artist Điềm Phùng Thị (b.1920) with me. Both Thao Nguyen Phan and Điềm Phùng Thị are Vietnamese and share the same birth date, though sixty-seven years apart. While they never met in person, Điềm Phùng Thị’s commitment to her art is powerfully reflected in the life and art of Thao Nguyen Phan. This is evident in Thao’s sculptural mother-of-pearl installation Magical Bow, your daughter is a traitor (2017–), which is anchored in the marble alphabet of Điềm Phùng Thị; whose sculptural, drawn, painted and filmic arrangements in Reincarnations of Shadows (2023–24) recall Phùng Thị’s domestic and public art; whose mythic-like paintings of innocent children dancing and playing games in textual voids in Poetic Amnesia (2014–17) evokes Phùng Thị’s floating fabric fragment paintings of landscapes and family. When I ask Thao what prompts her continuing study of this remarkable under-recognized Vietnamese modernist artist, she shares her affinity as not only a mutual delight in the language of form and materiality, but as a woman who was also trained abroad, whose deep conscience also understands the necessity to return, to tread carefully between ideological, social and the weighted hands of artistic hegemony—to be cautious of the burden of its expectations.

When Thao was in middle school, she recalls her father reading the news aloud of a Vietnamese artist returning from France to create a museum with her art as a donation to the city of her birth in Hue (Vietnam’s once imperial capital). It was a childhood memory that would return in 2010, when Thao was on a break from overseas study, with the chance to visit the then Điềm Phùng Thị Museum. She found it abandoned and forgotten, housed within a French villa provided by the Vietnamese Communist government. Despite its near ruin, Điềm Phùng Thị’s art shone brightly. There before her were intimate and monumental, indoor and outdoor sculptural figures; carved from wood, onyx, marble, steel, terracotta and more; as curvaceous statements reflecting maternal care, the yearning for liberation from war and occupation to the complex study of what it means to be human, and more. Thao Nguyen Phan fell in love. Điềm Phùng Thị, ever since, has been a central guiding force—a hand that holds, an imagination that stirs, a body that grounds.

Điềm Phùng Thị was initially trained as a dentist, being the first woman to graduate from such study in Vietnam. As a young adult, enduring French occupation, she felt compelled to respond to Ho Chi Minh’s call for resistance with the building of what came to be known as the “League for the Independence of Vietnam.” She sadly lost her first love to its fight. Falling seriously ill, she was sent to Paris in 1948 for treatment, where she stayed on, remarried, and continued to practice dentistry (some say she was a helpful informant). Having lost her own mother at an early age, Điềm Phùng Thị’s memory of another mother lying on a street with her baby clinging to her dead body haunted her, as she struggled to reconcile her distance from home amidst the barrage of constant conflict and abuse that was reported daily in the news. Seeking solace, she took up pottery in 1959, and soon realized that this skill in sculpting provided necessary healing. Studying under Antoniucci Volti (1915–1989), who would become her key mentor, Điềm Phùng Thị soon crafted her own modular alphabet which became her signature motif—sculptural shapes that are repeated across the majority of her oeuvre in various materials. Two generations later, this motif would find its way into the practice of Thao Nguyen Phan.

In witnessing the impact of Thao Nguyen Phan’s self-identification with Điềm Phùng Thị’s life and principles, I have been struck by the capacity of relational research between artists. How complex hidden histories and the resilience of such study can afford and locate a purpose within one’s own craft. It is this location of dialog, across time and space, of finding value and meaning in intergenerational mentorship (with individuals, whether alive or dead), that has greatly spurred my own curatorial methods.

Thus, over the years, I have developed programs that link artistic relation across time, disentangling critical inquiry with the past. Seeking, searching, probing, this way of looking, attempting to demonstrate how such curatorial prompts create a rich space of knowledge production, not only for artists, but also audiences—for such experience is, especially unequivocal through text books as it is in classrooms. It is in this spirit that “in-tangible institute” was founded, hoping to nurture the growth of curatorial expertise in Southeast Asia towards better experiential embrace of artistic production—for this industry, in this region, is far too dominated by commercial desire for the final output, which too often lacks patience and thus depth in respect to its past.

There are woefully too few women artists written into the official canonical records of art histories, but it is thanks to the likes of artists like Thao Nguyen Phan that crucial figures like Điềm Phùng Thị are re-membered, re-contextualized, and deservingly celebrated. I often re-read my notes in conversation with artists like Thao, for they map details and emotional attachments that anchor my commitment to curating as a discipline and as a relational tool. It is in their study of others that I am humbled, for I recognize their contextualization of the past (which often acknowledges the repetitive nature of human history), is at times the only means by which I learn and improve my craft. Uncannily, my notes reflecting Thao Nguyen Phan recalling Điềm Phùng Thị echo my own personal sentiments towards Thao. I find this deeply powerful, moving, comforting. Mentorship is an intergenerational series of cycles. I dream of more curators wanting to feel just how rewarding it is.