Installation of PVC print, flashlight, metal. Dimensions variable.

Description

“Landscape forms part of the intact body. Origin evaporates through changes. Earth becomes tongue. Image becomes sculpture. Linh raws inspiration from the salt fields in Nam Định that she photographed in 2009. According to her, the soil used for salt farming is mixed with water and other elements, then goes through a process of crystallization. In 2020, Linh went back to the field, and saw empty land: the farmers had given up their trade. She decided to transform the image of the salt field, altering the color of the soil, turning it pink, printing it on a PVC surface to mimic artificial skin, and then cutting it into the shape of a huge tongue.” – Quỳnh Đông.

After many field trips to various salt fields across the country from North to South, Nguyễn Phương Linh held her first solo show Salt (Galerie Quynh, HCMC, Vietnam, 2009). In her documentation photographs of these salt fields, human figures were nowhere to be found. In most of her works, human bodies become abstract and obsolete; they turn into sculptures, form geometric blocks and shapes, dissolve into materials, light, and space. Lately, in her video works, they reappear as specific people, who are her friends and family members, with their specific faces and personal histories. At the same time, they still represent notions of time and transfiguration, as mobile sculpture and moving bodies. This time, the tongue does not stick out from the ceiling. It sprouts from the wall, on a skeleton that runs along the tongue’s spine.

Description from White Noise Exhibition Brochure, 2023, p. 6.