Phan Quang, Re/cover no.12 (Seoul, Korea), 2016, 80x136 cm, digital C-print. Courtesy of Galerie Bao.
For its first appearance at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, Galerie Bao is delighted to represent the nominated artist Phan Quang, who is presenting his series Re/cover.
“Phan Quang presents photographic truth as both a sensory experience and a critical and collective issue. In it, he examines the conditions that enable, or prevent, the formulation of truth. His practice lies on the blurred boundary between documentary and staging: the image ceases to be evidence and becomes an active space for reconfiguring reality, rendering it legible through deliberate narrative choices and a redefinition of power relations.
This approach finds its fullest expression in the exploration of a little-known chapter of Vietnamese history: the fate of women who had children with Japanese soldiers who remained in Vietnam after the Second World War, unions that were often silenced and stigmatised, leaving gaps and identities marked by absence. Faced with these fragmentary narratives, Phan Quang does not fill in the gaps. He inhabits them, poetically. He lays bare their foundations and blind spots, in order to connect, in the most accurate and respectful way, the historical narratives with the personal stories of these communities in Vietnam.
Each photograph shows a subject in their domestic space, enveloped in a traditional white bridal veil. This device functions as a complex symbolic layer, evoking at once the thwarted union and the absent father, whilst serving as a protective screen between the gaze and vulnerable intimacy. It is both a shroud of the past and a gesture of modesty.
Through this deliberately sculptural staging, Phan Quang makes the silent persistence of these stories visible. The image becomes the site of a negotiation between revelation and concealment, between individual memory and national narrative. The truth he proposes is situated, sensitive and deeply political: an essential micro-history set against the dominant grand narratives. It powerfully reminds us that photographic truth lies as much in what is shown as in what is, significantly, concealed.
Thus, a decade after its creation, Re/cover remains a searing reflection on photography’s capacity to organise the meaning of the world, far beyond its claim to merely record it.”
Text by curator Nadine Hounkpatin
Phan Quang, Re/cover no.1 (Hanoi, Vietnam), 1/5 + 1 AP, 2014, 80 x 136 cm, tirage numérique C-print. Courtesy of Galerie Bao
Phan Quang, Re/cover no.8, (Hanoi, Vietnam), 4/5 + 1 AP, 2014, 100 x 170 cm, tirage numérique C-print. Courtesy of Galerie Bao
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