Air

Thu Van Tran Born 1979, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Lives and works in Paris, France Thu Van Tran’s pencil-drawn forms in Rainbow Herbicides 2018 might depict atomic mushroom clouds or innocuous plumes of dust, smoke signals or explosions on a movie set. Each is marked with six lines of brightly coloured spray paint. The bare materiality of these aerosol stains cuts against the monochromatic drawing beneath, and yet both forms of marking mimic falling particles of gas. The six colours refer to the euphemistically dubbed ‘rainbow herbicides’ used by the American military during the VietnamWar (1955–75): the notorious Agent Orange, as well as Agents Blue, Purple, Green, Pink and White. Released in blankets of fog from low-flying aircraft, these chemicals were used for the dual purpose of defoliating large areas of forest that might conceal the North Vietnamese forces and Viet Cong guerrilla army, and to destroy crops that would feed the enemy. In addition to the agents’ immediately damaging environmental effects, dioxins also caused widespread chronic illness and birth defects in the children of those exposed. Rainbow Herbicides is also, in part, an artwork about language, and the culturally laden gap between words and their referents. 1 The term ‘rainbow herbicide’ and its associated phrase ‘trail dust’ serve multiple semiotic purposes. While literally describing the coloured chemicals and the dust-like clouds they form when sprayed from the sky, these expressions also allowed for some distance, albeit semantic, from the terror of war. With her works, Tran reveals how strange it is that so much grey could come from chemical agents nicknamed after colours. For Vietnamese people to remember this history, she argues, is to remember the greyness that enveloped their homeland. 1 Mark Rappolt, ‘Thu Van Tran, My words fly up, my thoughts remain below’, ArtReview , January–February 2020, pp.50–7. Thu Van Tran / Rainbow Herbicides 2018 167 166 Invisible Invisible