From 14 September 2023 to 14 January 2024 Pirelli HangarBicocca presents “Reincarnations of Shadows”, Thao Nguyen Phan's first solo exhibition in Italy. Internationally recognized for her combined use of painting, moving image and sculpture, the Vietnamese artist creates dreamlike and poetic narratives that trace the history of her country in relation to contemporary environmental and social changes. The exhibition itinerary, conceived as a mix of visual, sound and tactile references between videos, sculptures, watercolors and paintings on silk and lacquer, explores Phan's practice, highlighting its symbolic and imaginative qualities. For the occasion, the artist created a series of new productions and an unprecedented video installation Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem) (2023): a personal reflection on the transformative and regenerative potential of art.

The exhibition is divided into two communicating and permeable areas. The first retraces the artist's career in an unprecedented way through an overlapping of canvases and moving images. Visitors interface with the central themes of Phan's practice: the relationship between man and nature; the social transformations of Vietnam and its colonization; the cultural mix between East and West, tradition and modernity, locality and globality; the combination of memory, folklore and fable to create collective stories as an alternative to the historical factuality imposed by dominant political forces. In Becoming Alluvium (2019-ongoing), an installation composed of a video and a series of lacquer paintings and watercolors on silk, the artist investigates the economic and social role of the Mekong River for the South-East Asia region through a fairy tale and dreamlike story. The story of two brothers and their subsequent reincarnations intertwines multiple perspectives on nature, love and consumption, becoming a metaphor for the human exploitation of the environment and its potential for regeneration.

The public is invited to walk through the large installation, No Jute Cloth for the Bones (2019-2023), made up of suspended raw jute drums, to access the second part of the exhibition. The work is a reference to the Great Famine that occurred in French Indochina between 1940 and 1945, largely caused by the transformation of rice fields into jute plantations during the Japanese occupation . The episode also gives rise to the three-channel video, Mute Grain (2019), in which the collective trauma is retraced through the intertwining of oral historical testimonies and photographic archives, mixed with fantastic imagery with a strong poetic charge. The second area is dedicated to the new production that gives its title to the exhibition “Reincarnations of Shadows”. The video installation, accompanied by a selection of sculptural works by Diem Phung Thi from the 70s and 90s, which inspire the seating and display of the exhibition, celebrates the career of this artist who is fundamental to the history of Vietnamese Modernism.