These works are so taciturn, so purposefully distilled, that to explain them along their social and historical contexts seems a betrayal
Existing bios of Phương Linh Nguyễn frame her as a Hanoi-based travelling artist whose ‘urge to excavate untold histories’ has spurred expeditions to salt fields and colonial-era rubber plantations, and resulted in works that ‘reflect on memory, heritage and the changing landscape of Vietnam’. Summer Breeze moves us past these evaluations: this assemblage of videos and sculptural forms – comprising fragments from past projects alongside contributions from two collaborators – ultimately seems more concerned with the terrain of the mind than it does the terrain of her homeland, despite the exhibition text’s liberal references to the latter.
Nguyễn’s Candies for Thu Ha (2012), an installation of candy balls made from sugar and lime, opens the show. Strewn along the raw concrete floors, these give little away beyond the randomness of their arrangement – the scattered stray balls suggest that they were dropped with force, or amid a panic. Also on the floor is a monitor, upon which the giant head of a blinking Asian female rests sideways on the edge of a swimming pool. Behind that, two sheets of pink PVC, both shaped like a lolling tongue, hang from a large rubber band (The Tongue, 2021). By this stage, the befuddled viewer, seeking a semblance of context or guidance, turns to the leaflet – and finds both. In it, these stark forms are linked back to Nguyen’s field work and experiences: the tongue to the salt fields of north Vietnam’s Nam Dinh province (which she first explored in 2009); the female head trapped amid city buildings to a myth ‘in the Mother Goddess tradition’; and the candies to a friend’s mother, who carried some with her during her evacuation to the United States.
Such disclosures are arguably as disconcerting as they are helpful: these works are so taciturn, so purposefully distilled, that to gift us with their social and historical contexts, to tell us how to see what we’re seeing, seems a betrayal of their intrinsic formalism. On the flipside, receiving directives for how to read the work gets you thinking about the compulsion that compels Nguyễn to turn connections to places and people into austere yet often droll minimalist motifs – and her process of distillation. Walking through Storage’s main room triggers an installation in an all-white adjoining room: Qi (2025) comprises a vertical metal needle that stretches floor to ceiling, and a length of rubber tube connected to an air compressor. Encountering the tube thrashing about and a loud hissing sound, you would never guess that Qi is a ‘quiet symbol of resilience and inherited knowledge’, let alone that it was inspired by her father’s struggles with a spinal injury, her memory of Typhoon Yagi ‘seen from her home along the Red River’ and the ‘breathlessness of asthma’.
Such dialogues between object and text serve to position this show as a diaristic record, or even an aestheticised form of self-portraiture or documentary, but these works also lend themselves to more universal, and sensual, framings. Key in this regard is a silent 11-minute video by her longtime artistic partner, Trương Quễ Chi, in which a man intently peels a potato (Peeling, 2019). Its sole gesture – the peeling action is visible only when you look at a make-up mirror on the floor from a certain angle, or at its reflection onto the ceiling – nudges this show into the realm of ontological, rather than personal or ethnographic, inquiry: thoughts on the nature of time, perception and the bodily being begin circulating. These connotations start out faintly but grow in intensity as other silent shorts on display wash over you, all of them involving human physicality or motion: a couple caress in the dark in Gabby Miller’s Resting (2020); Miller disappears into a black void while standing on her head, then reappears, in her Peephole (2018); people rock in chairs, slouch in beds and walk backward and forward through corridors in Nguyễn’s more recent work, Walk (2023). By the time you sit down to watch the longest video in the show, The Encounter (2021) – which was shot around the Red River delta and features cameos from football players and a folk-poem-quoting old man – Nguyễn’s oft-cited interest in the shape of her external reality sits alongside an interest in the shape of interior lives. Here the residues of a particular place become the building blocks of memory, and the plasticity of her practice seems to serve a deeper, philosophical excavation.
Summer Breeze at Storage, Bangkok, 5 July – 31 August
From the Autumn 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
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