HONG KONG.- Kiang Malingue announced its representation of Thảo Nguyên Phan.
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.
Thảo Nguyên Phan has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2025), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, 2024), Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan, 2023), Tate St Ives, (Cornwall, 2022); Chisenhale Gallery (London, 2020), WIELS (Brussels, 2020), and Factory Contemporary Art Centre (Ho Chi Minh City, 2017). Group exhibitions include National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) (Seoul, 2024); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021); Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2019); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2018); Nha San Collective (Hanoi, 2017); and Bétonsalon (Paris, 2016), among others. She has participated in numerous biennial exhibitions, including the 3rd Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2026); the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); the 15th Lyon Biennale (2019); the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019); and Dhaka Art Summit (2018, 2023).
Phan was shortlisted for the 2019 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, and was recipient of the Grand Prize, APB Foundation Signature Art Prize, Singapore Art Museum and the Han Nefkens Foundation-LOOP Barcelona Video Art Production Award, in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró, both in 2018. She took part in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé in Visual Arts Initiative in 2016-2017, mentored by performance and video artist Joan Jonas. In addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she is co-founder of collective Art Labor, which explores cross disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit the local community.
