The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

133 ARTISTS Top: Lie of the Land (installation view) 2017 Aluminium, wood, soil, seeds / 2 parts: 80 x 400 x 80cm (each) / First commissioned for ‘Imaginarium: To the Ends of the Earth’ at the Singapore Art Museum / Courtesy: The artist / Image courtesy: Singapore Art Museum Below: Bombshell boats in Bolikhamxay Province / Photograph: Keomany Souvannarath / Image courtesy: The artist Born 1979, Champasak Province, Laos Lives and works in Vientiane, Laos Bounpaul Phothyzan has forged one of the most experimental art practices in Laos, through which he confronts important social and environmental concerns that the country is currently facing. As well as being a highly regarded painter, Phothyzan runs one of the few galleries and art education spaces in the Lao capital of Vientiane. However, an important part of his practice is a swathe of projects that remain largely unseen, consisting of land art, site-specific installations, the recovery of found objects, and work in remote communities, which he often stages ephemerally and in discrete places. Phothyzan is compelled to engage with the environment and communities of his country, and often introduces ways of working that are seldom seen in the environment in which they are staged, to give voice to subjects he feels are critical to contemporary Lao society. Phothyzan has created temporary, site-specific works in various parts of the country. For We live 2013, he worked closely with local residents in his home province of Bolikhamxay, where they constructed three immense fish skeletons from driftwood to draw attention to the regular torrential floods caused by deforestation. In The Red House 2015–16, he installed a small, red fabric structure in a vast field, against high-rise developments in the distance, referencing the mass urban development that is transforming parts of the country. Lie of the Land 2017 is the result of Phothyzan’s reflection on Laos’s harrowing, decades-old danger of unexploded ordinances (UXOs). Two four-metre-long bombshells form the basis for these enormous sculptures — the metal casings that would once have carried hundreds of small cluster bombs are transformed here into hanging fern planters. In developing the project, the artist travelled through Bolikhamxay, Xekhong and Attapeau in southern Laos, provinces that are riddled with the remnants of war. In these regions, locals often disarm the munitions they find and repurpose them as everyday items. Large canisters become canoes, while smaller pieces become tools or domestic containers, or even parts of architectural structures. The recovery and disarmament of the shells remains a dangerous operation, but their casings are a cheap and readily available source of metal in remote areas. That these objects are still part of Laos’s environment and its communities is perhaps the most visible legacy of the landlocked country’s experience of the Indochina Wars, which made it the most bombed nation in the world, per capita. It is estimated that Laos was subjected to more than 580 000 bombing missions between 1965 and 1975, stretching from the northernmost provinces to the southern border. An estimated 270 million sub-munitions (bomblets from cluster bombs) were dropped by the US during this time, with an approximate 30 per cent failure rate, and which resulted in around 80 million UXOs being abandoned in the environment. Some 50 000 people are believed to have been injured or killed in Laos as a result of UXO incidents since 1964; UXOs continue to cause harm, particularly to farmers and children living in regional parts of the country. 1 Lie of the Land highlights the threatening and familiar form of the missile, yet within the metal casing, a diversity of life continues to grow. Simple, yet poetic, Bounpaul Phothyzan's work conveys the reality of a country that continues to deal with the destructive impact of someone else’s conflict, while signalling the perseverance, resilience and adaptability of the Lao people, for whom the remnants of a tragic past have become the tools of survival. Tarun Nagesh Endnote 1 See ‘Ending the threat of UXO in Laos’, COPE , <http://copelaos.org/ what-is-happening/unexploded-ordnance/ending-the-threat-of-cluster- bombs-and-uxo/>, viewed April 2018. Bounpaul Phothyzan