Mute Grain (2019)

Overview

In Phan Thảo Nguyên’s work, the Vietnamese countryside is a dreamscape in which cultural and political histories play out. Her SB14 installation explores modes of historical fiction, investigating the reliance on material archives and cultural memory as ways of including overlooked experiences.

Mute Grain (2019) examines the little discussed 1945 famine in the Red River Delta of French Indochina under Japanese occupation (1940–1945). In this area in the north of Vietnam, over two million people died of starvation, partly due to Japanese demands to grow jute over rice to support their war economy. Told from the perspective of two adolescents, Mute Grain weaves together To Hoai’s prose account of the famine, oral histories from Hanoi’s Revolutionary Museum recorded by historian Van Tao and mystical elements from Vietnamese folk tales and lyrical chronicles that recall Japanese post-war writer Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

The work revolves around a young woman named Tám, who becomes a hungry ghost unable to move to the next life, and Ba, who anxiously searches for his sister. Ba (March) and Tám (August) represent the poorest months of the lunar calendar, when farmers once borrowed money and worked side jobs to sustain themselves. Scenes featuring the protagonists are interspersed with those of the Red River Delta landscape and ‘sentry-boxes’, French Indochina-era transit hubs that connect paddy field to village. The sentry-boxes bear witness to histories of famine and the Communist violence of the land-reform-subsidy era (1954–1975), which politically divided Vietnam. Although not prohibited or taboo, official history rarely includes the 1945 famine, crop failures during French agricultural reform or the devastating typhoons and floods that left millions destitute during this period.

This tension between official and unofficial histories can also be seen in the projects of Antariksa and Ahmad Fuad Osman in the neighbouring galleries.