» Magical Bow (Lacquered Time)

Driven by narrative-making, and curious as to why the Vietnamese script utilizes the Latin alphabet, Thao Nguyen Phan started working on Magical Bow (Lacquered Time) in 2017, after stumbling upon the love tale of My Chau – Trong Thuy (also known as The Magical Bow), recounted in one of the first documents written in chữ quốc ngữ (Vietnam’s romanized script) by Catechist Bento Thien in 1659. The Magical Bow details the tragedy of love and betrayal as a consequence of lust for power.

This tale takes us back to the land of Au Lac, the Vietnam of 257–205 BC, under the rule of its founding king An Duong Vuong. In possession of a magical weapon given to him by the Golden Turtle, An Duong Vuong rests easy against his enemies’ attempts to infiltrate his kingdom. Undeterred, the ambitious Chinese warlord Trieu Da feigns a peace treaty and proposes his son’s hand in marriage to My Chau, An Duong Vuong’s daughter. My Chau soon shares her father’s secret with Trong Thuy, who soon hatches a plan to steal the weapon and invade Au Lac. Without his magical bow, An Duong Vuong flees the losing war and runs towards the sea with My Chau on horseback. Wanting Trong Thuy to find her, My Chau leaves a trail of goose feathers for Trong Thuy to follow, leading the enemy straight to her father. Realising his daughter’s betrayal, An Duong Vuong beheads her. Upon seeing her bloodied body, Trong Thuy, mired by grief and guilt, throws himself into a deep well.

In her 2019 series Magical Bow (Lacquered Time), a group of wooden lacquered bows float in space; their shadows resting on the silk painting Your Daughter is a Traitor, where various religious, mythical and fictional characters are depicted – each armed with a crossbow and an arrow, appearing frozen in time. Indeed, it is the codification of a historical truth memorialized with symbol (e.g. the crossbow of betrayal), systematized by language (e.g. traditional mythical tale), that ultimately enthralls and concerns Thao Nguyen Phan in its capacity to contain, visualize and transmit knowledge. In her visual rendition of the tale The Magical Bow, Thao Nguyen’s bows float disarmed, without their trigger arrows, in stasis as if they have been summarily paused. They are like the powerless army of An Duong Vuong, but for Thao Nguyen the static state of this army is not the consequence of an absent golden turtle claw, but the misplacement of learned history – like a bow whose function is rendered decorative without its arrow, so is the past rendered merely descriptive without its record (the arrow carries us to the target; the written record carries us to the reasons why something occurred).

(Edited from text excerpts provided by the artist and Zoe Butt)