does / not work

does not work

does work

If there is a beginning to the exhibition, it is the video dog (2025). Shot in Phung-Tien Phan’s typical method, with a hand-held smartphone, it begins with the clanging rhythms of a Kodak Carousel projector, heard over charts and graphs comparing the under/development of various countries, city populations and book sales by genre, amongst others. What are we learning? The data shown is not what is important. Rather it’s the very concept of difference, of interpretation and translation through comparison, via a projection of other/ness. Snowy, Hergé’s cartoon character and TinTin’s loyal companion, a remnant of a colonial intellectual past, pops up. Conducted by Phan off-screen, the stuffed toy roams an uninhabited home filled with the normal medley of a young family. It jumps up on the kitchen counter, pisses on house plants and a family altar, chews on shoes, in general, misbehaves. At one point, it takes a nap. Towards the end, the dog turns around and sees that Phan was following behind all along; it attacks her with jubilant frenzy. The camera mimics the excited fervour of the reconciliation, and for a brief second we see the artist, before the film ends.

Much has been said about the role of the domestic in Phan’s work. Not to negate its centrality, but to reduce an understanding of her practice to the domestic replicates the reductive adage that a female artist is limited to her autobiography. Rather, the domestic appears as a working studio, a platform for play when the family is away. What Phan brings up time and again is the deep contradictions of inhabiting the present in all its current saturations. The exhibition’s title refers to the role of labour, especially female creative labour, in the context of patriarchal capitalism, the slippages between the domestic and the professional, the violence of the everyday, and the general pressures of survival. To not work is not an option. Make it work.

At the centre of the exhibition space, around the pillar, is a typical wood working trestle split apart. Resting on opposite sides are two halves of a figure made of cellophane-stuffed clothing and wood. The clothing is the artist’s own. Hidden in the trousers are a box of paracetamol and tampons. Top and bottom gesture towards a sangfroid sensibility. The enterprise suggests the classic magic trick of a half-sawn person, which is also known as “Sawing a Lady in Half”. If there is any magic left, it disappeared with the magician.

Volkswagen (Romeo and Juliet) (2025), part of an ongoing series of sculptures, takes its structure from a portable home shelving unit. The middle shelf is decorated with a miniature, handmade model of a living space, like a dolls house. On the top shelf is a home altar, this one dedicated to the celebrated Japanese actor Takeshi Kitano. An Italian coffee maker/flower vase lies on top. An image from Gregg Araki’s iconic 1995 road movie The Doom Generation, itself an appropriation of Romeo and Juliet, is attached to the plant. Life is lonely, boring and dumb, the film’s character Amy says. On the side, a wooden board half-conceals a shirt. The attached shirt is performing a gesture like smoking. Sangfroid+.

doesn’t work is framed by olive green canvases hung low, as in wall panels for a nouveau Victorian design trend, yet another set decoration. Some paintings are completely abstract, while others depict monochrome mock ups of the current exhibition, working blueprints painted directly on canvas. They have a Kippenberger-ian “bad painting” quality to them. They are about the process of experimentation, of thinking, revealing the mundanity of creative labour. I’m just so sorry, the artist writes in one painting, as if embarrassed by the whole process.

Combined, they all seem rather random, but Phan’s experimental incongruity, if not irrationality, could be interpreted in another way. Amongst the information saturation of the exhibition seen as a whole—an intensity this text mimics, with love—there is a focus, the likes of which one may experience after taking a little too much anti ADHD medication: a laser sharp concentration on some scenes, a liquid fuzziness in others. Overwhelming and nonsensical, but also moments of deep clarity. It is better than being bored, exhausted, indifferent, Phan seems to counter.