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-anthro-pological 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 stick figure aimlessly wanders between buildings that have no memory of being built. It is spring. No real destination, just endless choices.
The humdrum of the everyday is treated with affection in Phan’s work, reflected in the choice of rudimentary materials. Working with elementary, ephemeral matter serves as an antidote to the permanence and authority asserted by traditional sculpture and its easy commodification. Perhaps this delicate precariousness serves as a stance against the soft imperialism of a techno-utopian worldview. Dino Phan slouches onwards, lopsided but unbothered.
No character, no problem.
We have our setting. Now what’s the script?
