The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 106 The head 2021 Single-channel video, colour, sound, 4:45 minutes The tongue 2021 Printed PVC sheet / 210 x 90cm Courtesy: The artist Nguyên Phuong Linh was raised in a highly artistic environment. Her father, Nguyên Manh Duc, co-founded Vietnam’s first artist-run space, Nhà Sàn Studio, in the family home in Hanoi in 1998. As a child, Nguyên regularly accompanied her father to villages across northern Vietnam, where he oversaw the restoration of historical temples and houses. In her adulthood, having established an artistic career and her own young family, Nguyên’s attention was drawn to consider these spaces by two events. In 2020, the house in which she’d been raised — and Hanoi’s experimental art scene had flourished — was demolished. She found watching the roof cave-in particularly affecting, having stared at the ceiling so many times from her bed. At around the same time, she revisited coastal Nam Dinh Province, encountering a friend of her father, whose deep, warm speaking voice reminded her of the South Vietnamese bolero singer Duy Khánh and inspired her to create an evocative, multi-layered work. ‘The encounter' series 2021 takes the form of a multimedia installation inspired by these events, combining sculpture and video to create a constellation of associations. Arranged across two rooms — which mimic the division of traditional Vietnamese houses according to gender — the installation introduces a host of evocative motifs, such as resonant sites and artefacts, movements of rising and falling, and the medium of cassiterite, a tin ore found in nail polish. Particularly striking are visual references to a figure of veneration among women in Nam Dinh: the mythical princess Liễu Hanh. A composition of enigmatic sculptures and videos, ‘The encounter’ is an atmospheric spatial reflection on memory, heritage and the changing landscape of Vietnam. Nguyên imbues her choice of objects with a surreal, absurdist, corporeal sensibility from the outset: an oversized image of a human tongue, printed on a PVC sheet slung over a fluorescent lighting tube, greets visitors on entry to the space. Behind it sits a simple bed, similar in style to the one on which the artist slept, penetrated by a thin cast cassiterite pole that extends from the floor to the ceiling. In her notes on the work, Nguyên poses the bed as a conceptual fulcrum — a space of rest, intimacy and reverie, of comfort and vulnerability, of conception, birth, illness and death. These implications play out like streams of consciousness in a set of videos that loop over two monitors. Their imagery, though disparate, frequently features suggestions of movement upwards, downwards and through: a book of blank pages pierced with a single hole; a young man running through an empty village, and others squeezing into tiny holes; breached ceilings; a rising tide. Other sequences are more familiar, more convivial: male figures at rest and play; a Nam Dinh landscape; a cozy interior. Amidst them all is a projection of the enormous, bodiless head of Liễu Hạnh, floating parallel to a luxurious urban swimming pool. After this cluster of associations, the adjoining space is sparer, more meditative, holding only a pair of suspended translucent resin blocks that rise and fall, refracting spotlight beams into pools that expand and contract with their motion. The installation’s unifying themes of movement and place reflect contradictory rhythms and flows in the passage of life — the demolition of a family home marking a breach; a warm encounter signalling continuity. While highly personal, they overlap with concerns of wider relevance, such as the hectic pace of development in and around Hanoi and, more broadly, the complexity of relationships between women and men. The various fragments of ‘The encounter’ resolve as a singular atmosphere, a three-dimensional map of the dreamlike territory where the strange and the familiar intersect, and the cycles of life meet irreversible change. Reuben Keehan Nguyên Phuong Linh Born 1985, Hanoi, Vietnam Lives and works in Hanoi