Thao Nguyen Phan

This beautiful book celebrates the first large-scale museum exhibition in the UK of Thao Nguyen Phan’s work, held at Tate St Ives.

Thao Nguyen Phan is internationally renowned for her poetic, multi-layered artworks which explore the historical and ecological issues facing her homeland Vietnam, while speaking to broader ideas around tradition, ideology, ritual and environmental change.

Phan’s mesmerising work intertwines mythology and folklore with urgent issues around industrialisation, food security and the environment. The threat posed by the destruction and excessive consumption of Earth’s resources is a recurring theme across her practice. Through storytelling, and the mixing of official and unofficial histories, her work often amplifies narratives that are less well documented, or in some cases obscured.

Featuring texts by Anne Barlow, Joan Jonas, Thao Nguyen Phan, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran and Pen Sereypagna, this beautifully illustrated exhibition catalogue explores the creation of Phan’s unique artistic language, bringing painting, sculpture and filmmaking together to generate a sensation of the ‘tangible in the intangible’. It covers both existing works and Phan’s new three-channel video work and painting series First Rain, Brise Soleil, (2021–ongoing).