Phan Quang artist

Rice Country:

Phan Quang’s Art of Place

From Sài Gòn I got lost on my way to visit my uncle in the countryside, despite the fact that I have been to Đức Hòa many times before. Lively storefronts, dusty pavement and verdant expanses merged until the city blurred into a distant memory. Although I spend much time in the countryside—my cousins are farmers—I am a city boy. But I didn’t mind taking the hour-long detour through Long An, through the small dirt roads and endless sky. I know Sài Gòn and my family’s patch of the countryside well, but I still don’t know how to make the transition between the two.

Caught in limbo between the city and the countryside, I was glad to finally see familiar fields and street vendors, to finally arrive at my home away from home to beloved smiles. Another artist has an artwork entitled Một Cõi Đi Về (Spending One’s Life Trying to Find One’s Way Home). Where is home? Is it in the city or the country, or in between? It has been a long homecoming. I wondered, as the divides between the city and the countryside blur, do Vietnamese feel disoriented? As Việt Nam develops away from a largely agricultural economy, do people feel lost?

Many Vietnamese regularly make the pilgrimage from city to country (and vice versa) for visits home (thăm quê), returning to the city for work. According to the 2009 census, an overwhelming 70.4 percent of Việt Nam’s approximately 85.8million inhabitants live in rural areas; the remaining 29.6 percent are urban dwellers. As rural-urban migrations increase, the distinctions between town and country blur. Tellingly, Việt Nam has been referred to by some academics as a “migration nation.” Despite the large number of rural residents, the Central Intelligence Agency notes that the agricultural sector’s economic output has been steadily shrinking, from 25 percent in 2000 to 21 percent in 2009. Industrial production now comprises over 40 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, effectively displacing agriculture’s dominance. How does one grapple with these tensions and contradictions? How does one spend one’s life trying to find one’s way home?

Rice Dreams

For his November October 2010 solo show at Galerie Quynh, artist Phan Quang deals with Việt Nam’s urban/rural divides and accelerated socioeconomic transitions. Through site-specific installations, large framed color photographs, and a video project, he comments on rural subjectivity. Born in the farming community of Bình Định, Phan currently lives and works in Sài Gòn; he is the embodiment of the blurred boundaries between the city and the countryside. Within and without the country, both the city and the countryside become archetypes, bearers for modernity and tradition, respectively. The countryside takes on a mythic presence. In past propaganda, agrarian life embodies communist ideals of labor, equality and productivity. In current socialist-capitalist advertisements for tourism, shots of abundant rice fields signify Việt Nam’s “hidden charm”—a lushly exotic, Edenic country (Kennedy and Williams).

Writing about the countryside, Phan QuangPhan states:

I was born in the countryside; farmer’s blood runs in me, but the city is where I choose to live. I know many people who reach a certain social position and then try to deny their origins. I think that’s a tragedy. Our whole life is a series of actions based on continuous effort to reach a certain result, to become a certain someone or to reach a certain purpose. You could say that the effort is to outgrow ourselves, to eliminate “backward” influences in order to move forward. But afterwards, are we happier and more peaceful?

The effort to “outgrow ourselves” may also refer to Việt Nam’s attempt to “move forward,” to develop. Instead of praising the logic of progress, his statement critiques the individual’s, and by extension, society’s effort to eliminate “backward influences.” Whatever is considered backward is dependent on political and cultural context. He challenges the assumptions of modernity. Việt Nam’s entry into the World Trade Organization has cemented its entry into the global economy when Việt Nam’s “arrival” within the global economy was cemented by its long-awaited membership in the it became a member of the World Trade Organization. . Its Its 1986 đổi mới economic liberalization policy has ushered in a new era of market development, as well as inequities and labor exploitations. Within the rhetoric of global development, Việt Nam is quickly moving forward, without a glance back to its recent past of poverty and dirt. If the city is the future, the countryside is the past.

It is interesting to note that quê refers to one’s birthplace and quê hương to one’s homeland. Quê is also slang for tacky, backwards, or “country.” Phan QuangPhan elaborates, “In reality, in the soul of each Vietnamese, from the government to the people, in culture as well as politics, all regard farmers as second-class citizens, second place.” Farmers are simultaneously exalted and demeaned, regarded as both the country’s backbone and burden.

Umbilical Umbrella

In Phan’s site specific durational installation with accompanying documentation (video, text and photographs) entitled A Farmer’s Diary, the artist placed a giant umbrella in a large rice paddy for about three months—79 days to be exact—and recorded through various media (video, photography and a text-based log or “diary”) the growth of the field and the disintegrating umbrella at a distance, from a single visual vantage point. The mustard and crimson-lined giant umbrella (evoking the colors of the Vietnamese flag) is a duplicate of ones used by imperial noblemen for shade. It may be seen as a symbol for long-standing power and the government. The artist noted that at first, the rice grew quickly under the umbrella’s shade. However, after the initial growth spurt, the shaded rice’s growth became stunted due to lack of photosynthesis. The rice growing without protection from the sun thrived. Phan states, “The umbrella represents an exalted, elevated part of society while the rice represents what lies beneath, what remains underfoot, yet comprises the majority of society.” In short, the umbrella may symbolize the highest echelons of society (perhaps its rulers and urban elite) while the rice stands for “the other half,” or rather, the other 70 percent rural population.

A large photographic diptych documents the project which took place from February 2, 2010 to April 21, 2010 in Bảo Lộc. The first large photograph consists of a grid of smaller photographs of the umbrella and rice fields spanning approximately three months. In a way, these photographs are visually the post-modern equivalent of Claude Monet’s famous Impressionist haystacks captured in shifting light and weather conditions. Monet produced about thirty paintings between summer 1890 and winter 1891, near his home in Giverny (Tucker). In both projects, situated in the Orient and the Occident more than a century apart, one can see nature’s sublime, mercurial beauty. Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “objective” photographic images of Western industrial buildings are evoked by Phan’s straightforward framing. Yet Phan’s project insists on a more critical, politically charged read. Depending on the viewer, one may see a critique of state policies, institutionalized hierarchies, corruption, or social and economic divides within Việt Nam.

The second large photograph of the diptych is the daily log Phan’s artistic assistant, a farmer, inscribes in blue ink on a formatted brown paper ledger. The notes are mostly minimal: “Another hot day. I’m very tired today,” or, “Today my friend is visiting, have to get him drunk” and so on. In both photographs, gaps in images and text are due to the farmer’s absence. These gaps may also speak of greater fissures. For the viewer who cannot read Vietnamese, the untranslated scribbles become a formal composition. The issue of literal and cultural translation comes to the fore. For an international audience who may be familiar to varying degrees with Việt Nam’s past and present, Phan and his body of work may come to represent the voice of a modernizing country. Or Phan may embody “contemporary Vietnamese art” since his imagery is rooted in place and (rural) identity. For a “local” Vietnamese general audience, Phan’s conceptual interdisciplinary practice may be a language that they may not be wholly familiar with. Perhaps for this Vietnamese urban audience, Phan’s work about the countryside may also be a glimpse into unknown terrain, or possibly territory too close to home. I sense that Phan is not interested in cultural translation (whether it be from country to city, or across countries), but rather he is more compelled by the distillation of his experiences and viewpoints into fragmentary work that transcends transcription. He makes work that plays with—and upends—text and symbols.

With a nod to Monet, Byron Kim’s long-term The Sunday Painting series, started in 2001, also uses images of nature (a color field sky) with text (a diary entry). Kim reinterprets Daoist Chuang Tze’s writings on the infinite and the seemingly insignificant: the magnificence of the sky is paired with the mundane details of Kim’s life. Phan’s work draws a similar analogy: the immeasurable power of the state is contrasted to the impotence of its people. In a different reading, the umbrella eventually falters, disintegrates while the rice endures, and thrives without protection.

The last component of A Farmer’s Diary is a four-minute time-lapse video, rapidly edited to show changes in season—rice growing and dying. The camera remains static as the clouds move and the umbrella sways in the wind. This idyllic imagery has an up-tempo pop soundtrack: it seems like everything moves to the synthesizer beat, particularly the shifts from one frame to the next. The resulting dissonant video reminds me of Asian karaoke videos in which the images don’t always sync with the pop songs. Yet everywhere in the countryside in Việt Nam, Thailand and Cambodia one can hear the latest K-pop hit, Britney bump and grind, or Euro-trash synth beat echoing from cell phones, boom boxes, pools and pool halls. I often find myself tapping my feet to local covers of stars such as Akon or lesser known dance-floor favorite walking through town, or sitting on long bus rides from the countryside to the city.

Phan states, “I want to describe a farmer’s life cycle, whose birth and death doesn’t have much effect on modern life.” Even though they are considered an insignificant demographic, Vietnamese farmers have profoundly impacted Việt Nam as a modernizing state. The decollectivization of the agricultural sector was an integral component of Việt Nam’s transition to a market economy (Ravillion and Van der Walle). From 1990 to 2005, Việt Nam’s food production nearly doubled. It shifted from importing food to being the world’s largest exporter of pepper and the world’s second largest exporter of rice and coffee. This agricultural productivity helped fuel the rest of the country’s developing economy. Despite this economic turnaround and an emergent middle class, the gaps between the rich and the poor continue to widen within and without Việt Nam.

A case in point is China, which now has the world’s largest urban population. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Science, 46 percent (620 million) of its population are urbanites. Despite a booming middle class, its urban-rural income gap is increasing. This gap is the largest in 32 years, since the country liberalized its economic policies in 1978. According to the Los Angeles Times, China is now ranked as the world’s second largest economy (and the world’s third largest consumer of luxury goods). Yet 36.3 percent of its population subsists on less than two dollars a day (Human Development Report 2009, UNDP). 200 million rural Chinese laborers relocated to cities to find work, yet many have moved back to their villages in recent years due to lack of employment (Central Intelligence Agency). Ministry of Agriculture official Song Hongyuan stated, “I am afraid the [urban-rural] income gap will continue to expand as the country focuses its efforts on urban sprawl, rather than rural development” (China Economic Review). As Việt Nam’s urban areas spread out, will its future mirror China’s present inequities?

Mud Love

A related large-scale photographic series features people from the countryside: some are nude, some are covered in mud; some men wear only safety helmets and trousers, other women wear white cut-out frocks. Trash and rice bags become body bags. Faces, eyes and farming equipment are poised heavenward, as if seeking salvation or redemption. These various images are all haunting, staged portraits following in the photo conceptualist tradition of Jeff Wall, Zhang Huan, Pipo Nguyễn-Duy and Gregory Crewdson. In one striking composition, huddled farmers caked in mud confront the viewer. One’s field of vision is sludge-colored. I am reminded of Pompeii, its citizens frozen in time, covered in ashes. Or the underworld of life-sized Chinese terracotta warriors, staring blankly ahead through space and time, mute witnesses. Phan’s country denizens become sculptures of mud, effigies. Phanwrites, “mud is only a temporary cover, it doesn’t last forever. The farmers, regardless of who they are, can’t hide their original nature, where they came from . . . When I am able to be truly myself, I still want to speak with the accent of where I was born.” Perhaps this view of origins is a nostalgic, romantic one, yet one which resonates with many Vietnamese. One’s hometown shapes one’s values and one’s world view. Phan speaks of the psychic changes of shifting from being a rural to an urban subject. As the American saying goes, “you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” The nature of rural life is being changed through infrastructural development. The Vietnamese government has bought large swaths of countryside and given farmers a subsidy for their property. Other areas once considered countryside are becoming increasingly urbanized as the urban centers sprawl outward. Hà Nội is rapidly expanding outward; some claim that it will become one of the largest capital cities in the world. Sài Gòn is following suit. Construction can also be seen in resort towns such as Đà Nẳng and Vũng Tàu; the face of Việt Nam is changing almost beyond recognition.

Another surreal photographic image reveals an interior with a row of pregnant women standing in a line, wearing white smocks over their colorful outfits. Each smock has a circular cutout at the stomach area; they evoke lab coats or medical garments. The vaguely clinical quality of these outfits bring to mind a host of associations: scientific experiments gone awry, a fertility clinic, or even the popular children’s characters Teletubbies—colorful interplanetary creatures that also have protruding bellies. Underneath these smocks the women wear colorfully patterned outfits, commonly seen in Việt Nam. The artist notes:

These mothers all hope for the best in their unborn children, like my mother, my wife and all of the other women from generation to generation. I cut the shape of a TV in front of their stomachs; I want to say that these hopes of theirs are also hopes that dwell deep inside of each individual’s soul.

The women’s expressions reveal both hopes and anxieties. The “TV”-shaped cutouts, the disquieting hospital interior and the women’s deadpan upward gazes conjures an ominous mood.

Phan Quang’s portraits of people from the countryside are not what one would expect. They do not have the Othering gaze of National Geographic editorials—spectacles of exotic color and ritual. In a way, these images are self-portraits of the artist and of Việt Nam, taken from the liminal vantage point of an insider and outsider; he becomes a translator of rural and urban Vietnamese subjectivity. Since Phan claims the countryside as his own, there is an intimacy and immediacy in the compositions. Nonetheless, Phan’s critical eye does not celebrate and embrace everything that is “rural.” For the artist, rural and urban spaces are undergoing tremendous physical and psychic changes. They both reflect states of mind, as well as policies of the state.

In between tradition and modernity, in between the city and the countryside, lie many contradictions. How does one spend one’s life trying to find one’s way home? In transit and in transition between the city and the countryside, things get lost, and lost in translation.

August 31, 2010.

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Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and independent curator currently residing in Phnom Penh.

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Endnotes

Special thanks to Phan Quang, Quỳnh Phạm, Tùng Mai and Thư Vũ for their help with this essay. All quotes from the artist are from Quỳnh Phạm’s written correspondence with Phan Quang, August 2010.

Moira Roth writes eloquently about Đỉnh Q. Lê’s project Một Cõi Đi Về (Spending One’s Life Trying to Find One’s Way Home) in an Art Journal essay entitled “Obdurate History: Đỉnh Q. Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory.”

The April 1, 2009 census shows that the Vietnamese population is 85.8 million people. The completed results will be announced September 2010. Mr. Đỗ Thức, GSO Deputy Director-General, Standing Member of the Central Steering Committee reported:

By 00:00 April 1, 2009, Vietnam had 85,789,573 million people, of which 25,374,262 persons were residing in urban areas, accounting for 29.6% of the total; and 43,307,024 were women, with a sex-ratio of 98.1 men per 100 women.

Vietnam’s population increased by 9.47 million, at an annual population growth rate of 1.2 percent in mid period of two censuses of 1999 and 2009, decreasing fast as compared to period 1989-1999.
This rate was different among provinces, especially for regions with high economic growth.

General Statistics Office of Việt Nam. Online: http://www.gso.gov.vn/default_en.aspx?tabid=462&idmid=2&ItemID=9198. In comparison, the 1999 Viet Nam census states that the population is about 76,323,173. Online: http://www.gso.gov.vn/default_en.aspx?tabid=476&idmid=4&ItemID=1841.

There is an annual conference on Việt Nam hosted by the Australian National University which focuses on political economy and socio-economic change. The 2009 session, held in Canberra, Australia, was called Vietnam Update: Migration Nation.

For more on Byron Kim’s recent practice, see Hosfelt Gallery: http://hosfeltgallery.com/index.php?p=artists&a=Byron%20Kim

According to the U.S. Department of State, the breakdown of Việt Nam’s economy is as follows:

Agriculture, forestry, and fisheries (20.7% of GDP, 2009): Principal products--rice, coffee, cashews, maize, pepper (spice), sweet potato, pork, peanut, cotton, plus extensive aquaculture of both fish and shellfish species. Cultivated land--12.2 million hectares. Land use--21% arable; 28% forest and woodland; 51% other. Industry and construction (40.3% of GDP, 2009): Principal types--mining and quarrying, manufacturing, electricity, gas, water supply, cement, phosphate, and steel. Services (39.1% of GDP, 2009): Principal types--tourism, wholesale and retail, repair of vehicles and personal goods, hotel and restaurant, transport storage, telecommunications. Trade (2009): Exports--$56.6 billion (first quarter 2010: $14.0 billion). Principal exports--crude oil, garments/textiles, footwear, fishery and seafood products, rice (world’s second-largest exporter), pepper (spice; world’s largest exporter), wood products, coffee, rubber, handicrafts. Major export partners--U.S., EU, Japan, China, Australia, Singapore, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Web. 18 August 2010. :< http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/4130.htm>.

The March 3, 2010 China Economic Review states:

According to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, urban per capita income was US$2,525 against rural per capita net income of US$754 . . . Government researchers have warned that effective measures must be taken in the coming years to narrow the difference between the rich and the poor in order to maiintain social cohesion. This is in contrast to the latest report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which concluded that the gap between the rich and the poor in China was decreasing thanks to increased welfare spending and major adjustments to the labor market for reducing disparities.

Web. 18 August 2010. <http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/dailybriefing/2010_03_03/China_urban-rural_income_gap_widest_in_32_years.html>.

China’s ranking as the world’s second largest economy can be misleading: “In news conferences, on talk shows and in editorial pages, commentators have hastened to pooh-pooh the statistics, saying they are wrong, misleading or meaningless. They compare China not to Japan or the United States, but to Albania — both have annual per capita income of about $3,600.” Los Angeles Times, Friday, 20 August 2010.