Phung-Tien Phan: a trial of many outfits
Phung-Tien Phan, Hans, 2023, detail view, in: Phung-Tien Phan, Kartoffel, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
Basel, Switzerland. From Phung-Tien Phan’s Kunsthalle exhibition Kartoffel, bracketed by interludes in spitting rain.
A room of air and light, prefixed by a totem in the entry hall’s stair landing – Phan’s working table, a printer, a feather-adorned apfelmus can, topped by an image of Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds – make for an unlikely hostess’ greeting. Pass him, and we are immediately in the midst of an installation comprising a series of half-painted plywood cabinetry, each of whose provisional structure is furnished by weighty, ponderous stones: their flighty ephemerality subtended. These units confront us like an audience standing to attention with the plain-facedness of gravestones. Indeed, is there not something of the form of the gravestone that behaves as a makeshift stand-in for the person departed, erected, as it tends to be, with an image that immortalises their likeness. For, after all, what are gravestones and totems but fetishistic, sculptural objects that give statement to ritual, so we may deal in the ecstasies of time.
Phung-Tien Phan, Kartoffel, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
Chunks of stone, affixed with a janky wire stem from which dangles balled up tissue paper, wrapped then with orange crepe paper. The very definition of decorative, Phan has tied them up in such a way that they resemble flare sparks or fireworks, hanging like that: confectionary, celebratory emptiness. The funerary rites of the East are couched in this paper-stuff exactly – the subtraction of monetary- and use- value from cheap, makeshift card offerings that perform as would-have luxuries in the flesh world. This engagement with absence momentarily estranges us from the world of materials, and yet it is precisely material signifiers that mobilise constructs, capital, contact with nether realms. East Asian metaphysics render traditions that hold these seemingly contradictory ideas in mutual fascination, rather than conflict.
Phung-Tien Phan, Fallen Angels 2, 2023, detail view, in: Phung-Tien Phan, Kartoffel, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
Backstage, you find yourself displaced from the general to the particular. The reverse of each piece transforms the plain-facedness of the gravestone into low-set altars or shrines common to Vietnamese domiciles, even businesses. Here, more printed movie stills bearing recognisable faces – portraits of actors in character roles that have been drawn from the web, the rubbings of a globalised popular cinema culture. Often military personnel, at rest in Phan’s gravestone-altars are her heroic has-beens: each sculptural ensemble titled after the first name of the actor-character, almost lovingly familiar. Each a personification the sculptures chronicle the movies Phan grew up watching. Movies raise us, and we may grow attached to their personae in exceptional ways; perhaps, against the nuanced realities of our own father’s travails – he is both hero and villain, culprit and victim – a part of us relishes the easy perfection of filmic artifice and simplism. And so a passport portrait of Phan’s father tentatively takes its place in one of the altar niches, spurious young man looking out of register with his sincerity, among the assured, masculine stars.
Phung-Tien Phan, front: Takeshi, back: Nicolas, both 2023, installation view, in: Phung-Tien Phan, Kartoffel, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
Still backstage, tidily arranged yet estranged and in doubtful relation to the images, are doll’s clothing. With contrived casualness at times, their placement invokes the attentive (and typically female) homemaker who, in the morning, might dutifully lay out her child or partner’s clothing on the bed. Or, too, the operations of a private ritual in possession of its own internal logic – the everyday act of dressing oneself for public appearance as routine, given, necessity.
As the late sociologist Marcel Mauss suggests, the gesture of gift-giving instantiates a complex of exchange and obligation between giver and recipient. Societies centring gift-giving practices also tend to perform ritual sacrifice as a form of gift-giving to ancestors, spirits, gods, which thereupon forges a tacit agreement: the moral obligation to counter-gift fortune, health, protection from harm. That the gift-sacrifice is discharged as surplus, it is perhaps no wonder that the paper offerings, transubstantiated in fire and ash, have permutations in many a luxury branded good. Mono-print Louis Vuitton logo handbags; perfume bottles in the distinct shape of Chanel No. 5; last season’s best-selling model of Nike sneaker; convertible cars in flash red. And doled out by the wadful every Vietnamese New Year Tết , stacks of joss paper cash in US dollars (because even ghost currency should be issued in US dollars, which is believed far more stable than the Vietnamese dong) fit for the leather briefcases of mafia kingpins. Following this system of belief, do the dolls’ clothings – these little fictions – represent a kind of offering that placates departed, impossible selves?
Phung-Tien Phan, Kartoffel, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, exhibition view, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
In the middle of the main room, a tissue-stuffed mannequin reclines in a hammock, a tired spectacle overwrought. Wearing Phan’s own clothes, it dons among other things a mono-printed logo sling bag and an army green jacket. Both are emptied of meaning, for want of imitating their originals, and yet it is their earnestness that reveals authentic, individual expression in fashion as a mere patchwork of depleted signs. A contradiction, no less, where camouflage-patterned doll's clothing intimates the will to be invisible, and the counterfeit designer sling bag betrays the aspiration to be seen. The dress of Phan stuffed cheaply with balled-up tissue, again with certain celebratory emptiness, thus becomes a carapace converging the actual, imagined, aspired.
Phan’s choice of exhibition title furnishes the work with these different modalities of reading: levity, but also the very real task that is always at hand, of transforming and fabricating personhood. The clumsy-sounding German vernacular kartoffel translates directly as ‘potato’, a cutesy pejorative colloquialism used to describe the very average German person – ‘as ordinary as a potato’. Nice or not, this is a term Phan would never herself be accorded, the inversion of the issue veering, then, towards the co-existence of ordinariness and exception in non-belonging. The same breed of diffidence pervades the exhibition, the type that appears to work against itself, to its own detriment or exclusion. Phan’s autobiographical work seems to use humour to curtail the more saccharine aspects of endearment, though your writer wonders if humour is just a failsafe for contending with inherited trauma, migrant identities, and other difficult subject matter. It is, perhaps, this paradox of distance in proximity that we have read as irony.
Phung-Tien Phan, Toni 3, 2023, installation view, in: Phung-Tien Phan, Kartoffel, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel
Phan’s short film Toni 3 (2023) has something of an oratorial thickness, a layered abstraction we also find in dream-like children’s tales. Jump cuts propel us from scene to scene, of which there are only a handful: a view of an underpass ceiling from the ataraxic vantage point of a stroller, a sense of being helplessly transported; a slideshow of archival family photos taken by analogue camera, an intergenerational haunting; a countdown to her rash-cheeked child that acts as a bedtime chant or magic wake-up call. Then, there is a public-ness about the named, potted archetypes: the film regales us with various genus of femininity, that themselves read like characters described by a film synopsis. ‘Move-to-France-and-Learn-French-Girl’, for example, is one your writer knows well, having been asked countless times if she intended to do just that, on the sole account of having a Parisian partner. Taking passage through these scenes, the film reads as a textured bundle of reflections on the easy, categorical defaults that can never exhaust the lived truths of identity. Haphazardly sutured together, it is precisely this agitation that riddles the fragmented subject. Phan the daughter, Phan the mother, Phan the artist; a trial of many outfits, but never quite fitting in.
https://www.kunsthallebasel.ch/en/exhibition/kartoffel/