Phan Thào Nguyên

Phan Thảo-Nguyên currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Phan is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses painting and installation. Through literature, philosophy and daily life, she observes ambiguous issues in social convention, history, and tradition. Through a combination of painting, video, performance, and installation, she manages to blend the universal and the local, reality and fiction in a poetic and visually powerful way, which opens new spaces for reflection. Mekong Mechanical focuses on a night shift of a young female worker who works in a fish factory in Tien Giang province, Mekong Delta, south of Vietnam, producing Pangasius fillets for export. The video is a day-dreaming journey of the worker constructed from the perception of the artist who intertwines scenes outside of the factory with a single repetitive footage of the worker trying to straighten fish fillets. Every time the footage repeats it is slowed down by 10% until both the worker footage and the viewer’s attention reach a state of boredom. The film quietly criticizes the Pangasius industry and other forms of industrialization of agriculture, which emphasizes on quantity and productivity regardless the rapid environmental degradation of the Mekong delta region.

During 2012 to 2013, this film was touring along with the exhibition “Riverscape IN FLUX”, organised by Goethe Institute in Hanoi, and exhibited in Hanoi, Saigon, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Manila and Yogyakarta. Recently it was featured on the online cinema platform Vdrome.