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The dinosaurs forgot their lines again. They roll out anyway, wearing their silly smiles, pompoms on their tails. In the back row somebody claps, another just watches. Phung-Tien Phan doesn’t offer a story, no hero protagonist, but a costume rack of archetypes, as interchangeable as they are ephemeral. If a recent realization in Phan’s work is, as Stanton Taylor writes for a previous exhibition, that all identity is performance, then here the flimsy pursuit of a ‘true Self’ is exchanged for a quasi-anthropological study of social behavior. Phan’s actors try on these characters, a contemplative gaze, a pose for the mirror: being together, dining alone, evolving consciousness. A mother, daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, artist. A political artist? Is there any such thing as a non-political artist? Here, we find the artist as a product, wrapped in cellophane and ornamented with saccharine bows, inextricably interwoven with mechanisms of extraction and consumption.
Meanwhile, a...More
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The dinosaurs forgot their lines again. They roll out anyway, wearing their silly smiles, pompoms on their tails. In the back row somebody claps, another just watches. Phung-Tien Phan doesn’t offer a story, no hero protagonist, but a costume rack of archetypes, as interchangeable as they are ephemeral. If a recent realization in Phan’s work is, as Stanton Taylor writes for a previous exhibition, that all identity is performance, then here the flimsy pursuit of a ‘true Self’ is exchanged for a quasi-anthropological study of social behavior. Phan’s actors try on these characters, a contemplative gaze, a pose for the mirror: being together, dining alone, evolving consciousness. A mother, daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, artist. A political artist? Is there any such thing as a non-political artist? Here, we find the artist as a product, wrapped in cellophane and ornamented with saccharine bows, inextricably interwoven with mechanisms of extraction and consumption.
Meanwhile, a...More
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