The project Re/cover
With a background in journalism, Phan Quang naturally has an artistic approach which is more socio-political than most other Vietnamese artists who basically study in an art educational environment that is more “optical” and aesthetical than conceptual and socio-political. It is this element that has lead all projects and works by Phan Quang so far, and it builds his voice. It is not coincidental that before the Re/Cover project of three years ago, in 2013, Phan Quang created a very interesting project that was microhistorial by its essence. For this project, Phan Quang had researched and then bought an ancient ceramic vase,which had been at the bottom of the sea for a hundred years in a shipwreck in Hoi An. Hoi An in the 17th and 18th centuries was an international busy trading port which welcomed the ships from America, Europe and especially Japan. This vase then was brought to Japan by artists and put in the bottom of the Yokohama Sea for one month. Hoi An and Yokohama share the same story but in opposite meaning in terms of modernization from the West. On the first of July in 1859,Yokohama port was opened to be international one and this completely changed the face of a small fishing village, of roughly 400 residents, into a vibrant sea port city, as it is now (4). Up to the period of emperor Tu Duc of Nguyen Dynasty, who was crowned in 1848, regardless of the fact that many Western countries including America and France in particular had shown their willingness to do trading with Vietnam but the emperor still rejected their offer as he considered these endeavors as invasion tactics to his nation.(5)
All of these contradicting connections, silent and intensive, of history between the past and the present, Vietnam and Japan, West and East, tradition and modernity, nationality and globalization, water and earth, finite and infinite, are represented in this work by Phan Quang—a series of simple photos in the style of commercial photography that show a vase that now has sea shells from the bottoms of both the seas of Yokohama and Hoi An attached to its body.
For me, this project is the beginning of a new approach to history by Phan Quang that I explain as a microhistorical approach. Following this line, there is the most recent project (on-going) by artists, Re/Cover. For this project, once again, the complicated relationship between Vietnam and Japan becomes his source of interrogation. However, this time, his subject is closer to present time. The artist has researched and made many trips the Vietnamese countryside to meet and talk with the different women who, around 1945, had relationships with Japanese soldiers, got pregnant, and then had Japanese-Vietnamese children. Those Japanese soldiers then followed the resitance force when the axis was defeated by the allies and then left Vietnam around 1954/1955. The special thing is that when taking photos, these women, individual or with their family, or when taking photos of their Vietnamese-Japanese children who are very old now, the artist asked them to be fully covered by a giant piece of silk that he ordered in a Japanese village which has a long tradition of making silk.
In the photos, the piece of white and transparent silk covers all the people and objects. In a way it erases their identity into a bumpy mass, but at the same time, it also highlights all of the people and objects against the landscape behind of them.
In some photos taken of an old woman, she is sitting with the photo of her Japanese lover, who after a very long time came back Vietnam to visit her and his children (of course he now has his own family in Japan). Behind the woman is the altar on which there is also the photo of the Japanese man, and it tells us that he has passed away. The scene looks very familiar. A woman is sitting in her house with the portrait of her lover. Behind her there is an altar on which a photo of the same man sits. Everything seems to tell us that this is a more than a cliché scene of woman who is waiting for her man who has never come back from war – a familiar cultural pattern in Vietnamese tradition. However, the weird visual world of the photo seems to warn us about the content of it, which is not as simple and cliché as it shows. This photo tells properly of the title of the whole project. Re/Cover. This is a play on words by Phan Quang. At the same time, the photo covers and recovers everything. Through the figure in the centre of the picture, it “covers” many conflicted and harsh realities of a difficult time under its peaceful and silent composition. At the same time, it also “recovers” as it tells about the conciliation with the existence of the altar where the deceased Japanese man’s photo is set, and by which he has become part of the woman’s own life, house, landscape and above all culture. Is history made from the axis of covering and recovering endlessly? Here Phan Quang’s photo owns the power of the microhistorical data, which does not try to accuse, to condemn, or to articulate the multiple into any logical narrative. On the contrary, all of this “data” only tries to show the moment of the endless clearing and unclearing, covering and recovering when the conflicted realities are encountered and thus formed into the events. Here, what we see is the microhistory, that is the “minor players”, the “polyphony” events, the oral stories that are changed from time to time following the different speakers, and so on
At the end of the day, what really happened in Vietnam and the world during this period of the 1940s? Is this the story of the beginning of a legendary resistance of communist Vietnam against colonial France – a resistance that lead to the formation of the first socialist nation in Southeast Asia? Or is this the story of violent globalization from West to East, which cost the lives of millions of people? Or is this the story of the dramatic end of World War II by the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hirosima and Nagasaki that lead to the change of Japan – the change that made the country the giant it is today?
Under these “grand” and ideological stories were the normal and ordinary lives of people who just tried to survive within the “storms” that suddenly entered into their lives. These are the people of Phan Quang’s work But even within these people, the stories are read in varying and conflicting ways. Were they, the day they encounterd the Japanese soldiers, innocent Vietnamese woman who were forced to have sex with the Japanese invaders as in the familiar patterns of the ideological and nationalist historical text books? Or were they part of a very difficult story about human being’s love that overcomes all the borders of nationality and patriotism? Is this the story of the ostricization of the woman and her children, who for a long time could not be officially accepted as part of the local community, which made their lives extraordinarily difficult? Or is this the story of faithfull longing for a lover, the story of the commitment of love?
The artist does not tell us the complete story. He shows us the possibilities that somehow conflict with each other. The imagery in his photo series is disturbing. The people, individual or group, sit or stand in the landscape of the Vietnamese countryside or in Vietnamese traditional interior space, fully covered by a piece of white silk, which looks like a shroud. Are these people an organic part of the identity of the space in which they are living? Or this is the moment in which they and their living space are split from each other? Are they a “sentence” that is in the past-continous or something that is now in the present-perfect tense? The strange visual world of the photos serves as the necessary “out-of-tune” that prevents any intention to get a conclusion from the audience.
From this perspective, the project Re/Cover by Phan Quang is an approach to history that is so different than that of the previous generation. It is more concrete in the way that it focuses on the historical subject, but at the same time, it is more abstract in the way that it tells the story. It is more a documentary in the way that it uses ethnographic instruments to work with the subject, but at the same time it is more fictional in its visual world. Actually, what Phan Quang would like to show is not history, but quasi-history, not documentary, but quasi-documentary. Phan Quang’s project owns the quality of being in between different genres in the way his subjects in his project own the quality of being in between nationality, politics, sociology and culture.