Thảo Nguyên Phan (b. 1987, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) cultivates an ever-shifting relationship between paintings, videos, sculptures, and sound, by bringing them into conversation in the forms of installations and environments that are at once intimate and expansive. She finds resonances between fields of knowledge, by drawing the interconnectedness between inventive forms in literature, poetry, art movements, and folklore, understanding history as a commingling of events, ideology, memory, and mythologies. With works that operate as relays and feedback that course through the past, present, and future, she materializes pathways between physical and psychic realms, and advocates for an ecology that arises out of slow and close observation, towards its capacity to uncover obscured and forgotten narratives. Her work offers an imaginative and sensorial approach to engage with the imbricated land and colonial legacies of homeland and its ongoing transformation, the impact of industrialization and extractive industries on food security and the environment, and the sentient signals between animate and inanimate world, and between human and nature. In Phan’s moving image work, fabulation takes the form of re-enactments, frequently in collaboration with children and adolescent actors. She orchestrates performative gestures and actions informed by and interweaving folktales and historical accounts. Natural elements such as flowers, leaves, grains of rice, come into contact with and overwhelm the human body, evoking the senses into an euphoric state. In these oneiric scenes of ritual purification, lie the potential in the reorientation of official history, surfacing silence into redemptive possibilities.

Narration as Metamorphosis

Phan uses forms of narration as a supple material, that fluidly ebbs and flows, and regulated through her conscious acts of withholding that proffers a space for reflection. Stories of construction, destruction, and rebirth, as well as how these themes manifest materially permeate her work. In her research, she pays particular attention to structure and transmutation across cultural and literary traditions, embodying the spirits of experimentation in her work, such as the short stories of Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories from 1923 to 1972 and Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1957 Le Livre (The Book), the unfinished thirty-year-in-the-making, posthumously published visual poem which interrogates its own construction. Some of her references are more direct, such as the 18th-Century Chinese author Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, a tale of a sentient stone that implores a Taoist priest and a Buddhist monk to take it with them into the mortal world, thus entangling it with human emotions. Told over 120 chapters, with 80 chapters from Cao’s original version as The Story of the Stone, it commences with a couplet: “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true / Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.” Phan metabolizes the episodic structure and the concept of metamorphosis across her practice in the multi-part project Mute Grain, comprising the titular video Mute Grain (2019), the painting series Dream of March and August (2018-ongoing), and the installation No Jute Cloth for the Bones (2019-ongoing).

Contemporary Mythologies in Silk and Lacquer

Trained in lacquer painting at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts, and in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Phan’s paintings in silk and lacquer embed within them movements between figuration and abstraction, and between transparency and opacity. Painting directly on silk, layers of graphite, acrylic, gouache, and watercolor, she often depicts singular figures inhabiting contemporary built environments filled with mechanized objects, such as motorbike, airport baggage carousel, factory conveyor belt, and escalator, in a state of decay or reclamation by nature. In the two-sided sculptural work Mythologies of Engines (2025), silk paintings are mounted onto standing screens, their forms inspired by the staggered lacquered wood screens by Irish modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878-1976). On one side, one approaches silk paintings that depict a score of motorcycles parked at the base of a large tree and entwined with its foliage and roots, inscribing contemporary mythologies with an open-endedness, steeped in the quotidian life of industrialized Vietnam. On the other side, Phan has created abstract lacquer paintings that combine pigment, eggshell, and silver leaf, subsuming the morphing topography of water and the river.

Water is essential to the fabrication of both silk and lacquer. Silk requires water in its production, while lacquer requires humid conditions for layers of resin to cure, followed by sanding and removal under running water. The sedimentary layers of lacquer serve as a metaphor for the Mekong River, its ever-shifting boundaries and as a source of sustenance, beset by cycles of flood and drought, wrought by human intervention and the climate crisis. It is imbricated in geopolitics, through its course from Tibet to China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and culminating in the Mekong Delta in southwestern Vietnam. Meshing the folklore of the Mekong with the words of novelists Marguerite Duras and Italo Calvino, the video Becoming Alluvium (2019-ongoing) begins with the words of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore on nature, nurture, and misdirected love. It tells the tales of three reincarnations of two children, who are victims of the 2018 collapse of a hydroelectric dam on a tributary which caused devastating consequences in the Attapeu Province in Laos. The work recuperates the Mekong River, which is “often mythologized, stereotyped, or economically exploited,” as poetic witness and a site of regeneration.

Permeable Membranes and Reparative Poetics

Phan conceives each exhibition as an environment that facilitates the flow of the viewers’ bodies and their gaze, in a co-productive spatial logic that attempts to reroute history. For the multi-part project Mute Grain, she creates permeable membranes that bridge the physical and the metaphorical. No Jute Cloth for the Bones (2019-ongoing) is composed of suspended dried, raw jute stalks which act as partitions and as active backdrop for other artworks, and takes on different configurations depending on context and architecture. The stalks’ varying lengths create a shimmering effect of light and shadow that one could pass through. Tough and inexpensive, jute stalks are often used to construct temporary shelters in Vietnam and Southeast Asia and as firewood. Jute and castor were grown in place of rice to support the war economy under the coercive demands during Japanese Occupation, partly contributing to the famine of 1944-45 when two million died of starvation. Stripping away the inner jute thread, Phan’s stalks are “bare bones, without skin, without flesh.” Their rustling from touch produces a “lullaby dedicated to the loss of lives, to the separations of the living and the dead, unable to reconcile due to the tragedies of war and famine.”

The video Mute Grain (2019) is told through the journey of two abandoned siblings, brother March (Ba) and sister August (Tám) named after the lowest-yield periods of harvest seasons. The death of Tám prompted Ba to escape to the city in search of sustenance. In this elegiac work, voiceovers of actual famine survivors interweave with watercolor drawings of children superimposed onto archival photographs, to animate, honor, and perhaps bring these not-yet-forgotten spirits back to life, into a reparative poetics. The paintings series Dream of March and August (2018-ongoing) are composed of pairs that are hung apart, with each part serving as what Phan calls a “counterpoint to the other: disagreeing while supporting each other.” These silk paintings are suspended to create an environment in which viewers can walk between these palimpsests, between recto and verso, casting shadows through their translucence.

Reincarnation as Methodology and Philosophy

To elucidate her methodology and philosophy, Phan often turns to the etymology of Tri Âm (the Vietnamese word that stems from the Chinese, 知音), with its literal translation as “understanding sound or music” to root her belief in kindred connections, with art as part of an ecosystem. She seeks and intuits chance encounters with other artists and their artworks, and the natural world, which together form resonant relations. “It leads to another Vietnamese word with Chinese origin and one of the most popular word used in the Vietnamese language, Duyên (緣 in traditional Chinese),” Phan states. Translated as fate, or a spiritual bind that goes beyond the physical body and across lifetimes, “Duyên is when the matter of chance, accident, and unexpectedness overcast the logical intention of will. It is effortless but can be out of control. It indicates an intricate web of connections that invisibly binds human and non-human relations, and relates to the Buddhist concept of interdependence.” Forging these karmic bonds thus grounds Phan’s interdisciplinary practice, in which motifs recur or reincarnate across different mediums and bodies of works.

Phan took part in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé in Visual Arts Initiative in 2016-2017, where she was mentored by performance and video pioneer artist Joan Jonas, who prompted her exploration in moving image. Through material and academic research into archive documents and oral records, her video works usher in perspectival and subjectival shifts, which forms a dynamic habitat with her paintings. Moving between animation and filmed segments, in single-channel works, and multi-channel installations that fluctuate in the number of screens in an organic process, her moving image practice is akin to an organism that expands and contracts, responsive to architecture and context of each exhibition. Challenging the medium of moving image as permanent, she works on iterations towards a sense of openness and transformation. For example, the three-channel Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem) (2024), and the five-channel Reincarnations of Shadows (2025), contain subtle differences of rhythm, elastically structured so that the former is “a poem for the afternoons” while the latter is “a poem for the nights.” A life tribute to the Modernist artist Điềm Phùng Thị (1920-2002), each iteration interlaces re-enactment, audio recording, historical photographs and footage, collaged with watercolor drawings, unfolding to a radiating score of đàn tranh, a traditional Vietnamese string instrument.

Gaze Towards an Oneiric Aliveness

Keenly aware of the exoticizing gaze through which female artists from post-colonial context are seen, Phan brings into visibility pioneer figure Điềm Phùng Thị, who was part of the Resistance during the First Indochine War. Điềm began studying art in 1959 at the age of 39, eleven years after she went to France for medical treatment in 1948. Initially working as a dentist, she found art as a channel to process the trauma of the Vietnam War from afar. She returned to Vietnam in 1992 with all of her artworks in response to Communist Party’s General Secretary Nguyễn Văn Linh’s and Prime Minister Võ Văn Kiệt’s call for reformation to rebuild the country through intellectual, artistic, and financial means. She invented a modular system of seven abstract, symbolic forms that can be infinitely combined, manifested in sculptures, paintings, furniture, and jewelry, each with its own “soul, life, and dimension.” Since 2017, Phan has forged an ongoing conversation with Điềm’s legacy, creating benches, sofas, tables, pedestals, and display cases that support viewers and artworks, in the form of these seven shapes. Since 2021, she has included Điềm’s work alongside her own, first in Vietnam (The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, 2017) and then circulating internationally (Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2023; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2024; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2025; 3rd Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, 2026). In the iterations of Reincarnations of Shadows, Phan juxtaposes Điềm’s modular forms with echoing motifs in imperial and modernist architecture, creating a dialogue between the colonial past of Vietnam and its present, between luminosity and shadows, physicalizing the corporeal and the sensate into oneiric aliveness, animating Điềm’s words: “Everything I touch, it’s as solid as a rock while fugitive as a bubble,” which resonates as an apt description of Phan’s capacious practice.