Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2021
1983
Germany
Drei
"Amid the slipstream of salesroom-ready JPGs, Phung-Tien Phan’s offhand aesthetic almost conjures something like authenticity. Lo-fi and rough-hewn, it caters to that longing for an art that doesn’t take itself too seriously. But just like everything else on-screen, her realness is about as real as reality TV. What starts off as an awkward joke soon segues into a meditation on the minutiae of middle-class anxiety—one where the confessional becomes just another mode of self-stylization, and critique gives way to parody."
From:
Again, This Isn’t an Art-World Critique: Phung-Tien Phan; Stanton Taylor for Mousse Magazine, April 2021
Images:
Lil Emo, 2019 (3 of 6 parts)
Toy trucks and photographs in presspan collecting vitrines with sliding glass panes; each vitrine: 60 × 80 × 9,5 cm
Objects
Not yet titled, 2021
Kitchen shelf, soda water device, stuffed animal, hook, incense sticks, saw blade
Various dimensions
(detail, studio view)
Below:
Untitled (dizzy), 2021
Kitchen shelf, drainer, plastic box, incense sticks, clothes hanger, raincoat, coat, gift ribbon, knife
Various dimensions
Installation view:
Café Chardonnay - alles nehmen, 2020
Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg
Installation view:
Café Chardonnay - alles nehmen, 2020
Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg
Installation view:
Café Chardonnay - alles nehmen, 2020
Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg
The "Volkswagen" cabinets consist of shelving units crowned with retro Italian coffee tables serving as vases for exotic flower displays. On the bottom shelf, she reconstructed a cramped studio interior, common in Vietnamese cities, with dollhouse furniture. All the elements including the walls and floors are painted the same colour, erasing the possibility for any mark of individuality. The upper shelf echoes Buddhist shrines popular among the diaspora, but the traditional candle has been replaced by a coloured lightbulb. Here again the incongruous yet cheerful combination of objects conveys an unexpected poetry, as the works read like a multi-generational biography.
Installation view:
biste links oder frustriert, 2019
Drei, Cologne
Installation views:
biste links oder frustriert, 2019
Drei, Cologne
Volkswagen (Saigon), 2019
Presspan, wood veneer, Multiplex plate, wheels, dollhouse furniture, acrylic paint, lamp, devotional picture, teapot, pot with chopsticks and coaster, bowl of rice, spoon, beer, toothpicks, incense, sieve carrier espresso machine, plant
141,5 × 50 × 50 cm
Collection of Museum Folkwang, Essen
Volkswagen (Saigon), 2019 (detail)
Untitled (Bankett Gruppe 0), 2016
Wood, tiles, cut plastic bottles, plants
110 × 240 × 210 cm
Untitled (Bankett Gruppe 0), 2016
Installation view: Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, 2016
Untitled (Bankett Gruppe 0), 2021
Installation view: Sweet Lies, Ludwigforum, Aachen, 2021 (top)
Detail (bottom)
Moving Image
“I’ve noticed one thing lately... man, people love vintage stuff, like those Jean Prouve chairs - ah, dying for it, or those Charlotte Perriand dining tables - a - mazing! Are those circa when Vietnam squeezing was enhanced through French colonial leadership? Are those handbags from the Margiela-era com- pletely iconic? Man, people love vintage stuff, and by people I mean wealthy old, fifth generation white is acting poor, taking flixbus, riding bikes, passing to the south of France, then Swiss, then to Italy to check out the Venice Biennale real quick with no cash for tip in the bag, those people ‘looove’ vintage stuff, they love hunting it, obsessing about it, googling it—the cheaper the better, yeh I know, I feel like I’m talking about Man and Woman. I know, there are some sad emotions right now, I feel it too, I’m also sad, I haven’t felt my patriarchy yet. I’m gonna call my Mom then, she always tells me the same two jokes. Hear me out... 1. a baby, a priest and a rapist go to a bar, classic, and 2. you can’t break a heart if you don’t have one honey! Oh wait, I forgot, there’s another one... What is more dry? My pussy or making a PHD in architecture? Thank you Mom, thank you.”
From:
Girl at heart, 2020
Girl at heart, 2020
Online viewing
Girl at heart, 2020
Installation view: Tourism, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2021
"Phung-Tien Phan's single-channel-video video 'Actress & Actors' (2019) “follows cultivated white men as they flaneur their way through posh neighborhoods and lush fields to the sounds of Carly Simon or the Strokes. Meanwhile, Phan herself makes phone calls, brews coffee, arranges an interior set. The cuts are abrupt and the audio rarely syncs. At one point, the men suddenly seem to be miming a passage from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)—but, as the work’s title reminds us, they’ve probably been performing all along. Though these might sound like the hallmarks of avant-garde montage, the effect is less Brechtian alienation than awkward self-deprecation: Phan’s film is the kind of funny where you want to laugh but are never quite sure if you’re supposed to."
From:
Critics' Picks
Stanton Taylor for Artforum, January 2020
“Actress & Actors has a wonderful medley-like quality, tacking together disparate elements through highly stylized edits and unusual shots, blending them with pop songs and dubbed dialogue from Hollywood films. The video’s opening scene shows the artist shifting from her role as an actress to that of a director, emphasizing the many parts that we have to play in life. Elsewhere, two young men who are sometimes filmed in private and sometimes perform stilted dialogues in scripted situations highlight how people play up for the cameras. The line between filming oneself and being filmed, between being oneself and playing a role, becomes increasingly blurred."
From:
Phung-Tien Phan Unfolds the Many Roles We Play in Life; Moritz Scheper for Frieze, January 2020
Actress & Actors, 2019
Online viewing
Actress & Actors, 2019
Installation view: biste links oder frustriert, Drei, Cologne, 2019
"Half Moon (2019) opens with the hair of the artist falling towards us, through railings, onto the lens, our screen. In all the works we accompany the artist through the process of filming, there are unfussy cuts, diaristic scraps of material, intimate personal games. In Half Moon the artist talks with Simon about the loss of his trench coat; seen close-up men are delicate objects sometimes. With no obvious narrative form revealed, the act of looking leads one only to the understanding of the absurdity of trying to read life as a story. Romance becomes idiotic, inconsequential. The presence of people is fleeting, they remain somewhat abstract and casual as we consume them (and all looking is consumption)."
From:
Rozsa Farkas, Exhibition text of Galeria Half Moon, Drei, Cologne, 2019
Half Moon, 2019
Online viewing
Half Moon, 2019
Installation view: Galeria Half Moon, Drei, Cologne, 2019
Biography
Phung-Tien Phan was born in 1983 in Essen, Germany, where she lives and works.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Café Chardonnay, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg (2020); Galeria Half Moon (with Whitney Claflin); biste links oder frustriert, both Drei, Cologne (2019); Safety First (with Niklas Taleb), Aedt, Düsseldorf, (2018); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2016). In 2021, she contributed to exhibitions and projects at KW, Berlin; Ludwigforum, Aachen; Arcadia Missa, London; Kunsthaus Glarus, a.o. Upcoming solo exhibitions will take place at Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (September 2021), and Drei, Mönchengladbach (February 2022).
FULL CV
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2020
1983
Germany
Drei
Phung-Tien Phan
'Café Chardonnay - alles nehmen'
Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, 2020
Phung-Tien Phan
'biste links oder frustriert'
Drei, Cologne, 2019
In the rollable sculptures of the “Volkswagen“ series, Phan stages a functional single room apartment on only a few square centimetres, which could be found in urban built-up areas from Hanoi to Cologne. Fully drenched in a colour each, they become a projection screen just like the overlying shelfs. The displayed private altars have played a central role in Vietnamese Buddhism for millenniums in ancestor worship and sacrifice. For many Vietnamese, especially the ones in diaspora, they serve as a medium between the worlds, as an interface between the living and the dead family members, providing emotional support in a culture that rejects individualism. With the top-mount portafilter coffee machines repurposed to flower vases, each object becomes a piece of furniture in themselves.
The ambivalence underlying Phan’s role as bourgeois European grows deeper with the two sculptures titled Volkswagen. These portable shelving units each contain one scale model of a cramped studio apartment—like those common in Vietnamese cities—and one reinterpretation of the kind of scaled down Buddhist altars popular among the country’s diaspora.
Phan contrasts these homages to her ancestral home with relics from her actual one: vintage European espresso machines, humorously repurposed as floral vases resting on top of the sculptures. Much like the cuts in Actress & Actors, the assemblages suggest that biography can be shown not through a single location or scene, but rather through what happens in between.
(Stanton Taylor, Artforum, 2020)
Installation views: Phung-Tien Phan, biste links oder frustriert, Drei, Cologne, 2019
In Lil Emo we encounter a compilation of international pop stars, actors, musicians, models, writers, recorded at the peak of their careers, in their early years. The artist has chosen them in the light of her own biography and projected longings and embedded them in the environment of standard commercial display cases full of german advertising toy trucks, with which they merge into an inseparable unit.
Phung-Tien Phan
Girl at heart, 2020
Single-channel-HD-video, sound
00:05:09
Phan’s videos work with a seemingly private everyday aesthetic of trivial self-stylization that makes you think they weren’t a precisely planned spectacle, but that’s what they are in the literal sense of the word. Architecture, furniture, picture-in-picture situations, and the protagonists oscillate in their depictions and actions between inner desires and outer representations, between their own notions of identity and the gazes of “Others.”
Her camerawork and editing evoke YouTube videos and suggest a kind of intimacy that goes hand in hand with a sense of aimlessness and restlessness. Yet this aspect also makes them equally inaccessible at times.
Phung-Tien Phan
Half Moon, 2019
Single-channel-HD-video, sound
00:10:34
In Half Moon (2019) the artist talks with Simon about the loss of his trench coat; seen close-up men are delicate objects sometimes. With no obvious narrative form revealed, the act of looking leads one only to the understanding of the absurdity of trying to read life as a story. Romance becomes idiotic, inconsequential. The presence of people is fleeting, they remain somewhat abstract and casual as we consume them (and all looking is consumption).
(Rozsa Farkas, 2019)
Phung-Tien Phan (b. 1983, German) lives and works in Essen, Germany.
The artist recently staged solo and duo exhibitions at Drei, Cologne (with Whitney Claflin, 2019); Aedt, Dusseldorf, (with Niklas Taleb, 2018); and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2016). She furthermore contributed to exhibitions at Campoli Presti, London (2020); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Werkhalle, Cologne (both 2019); Skulpturenpark Moltkeplatz, Essen; Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow; 8. Salon, Hamburg (all 2018); Shanaynay, Paris; Belle Air, Essen (both 2017); Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf (2015); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2014) a.o.
Phan’s solo exhibition ’Café Chardonnay - alles nehmen’ is currently on view at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg. In spring 2021, work of hers will be on view at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany.