The sky, the sand, the lashing waves
Opening: 06:30 pm, Fri 01 Aug 2025
Open studio: 11 am – 07 pm, Tues – Sun, 02 – 24 Aug2025
Manzi Exhibition Space
2 ngõ Hàng Bún, Hà Nội
From the organizer:
Unlike his earlier photography practices that established his artistic reputation, the open studio at Manzi this August marks a pivotal shift in Phan Quang’s creative trajectory, foregrounding video installation as the primary medium. Departing from meticulously composed still images characterized by a stand-apart-from-the-moment approach—saturated with layered conceptual frameworks and incisive critical observations that dissect reality like a surgical blade, revealing obscured narratives and repressed traumas or persisting sociocultural prejudices—his latest body of work pivots the gaze inward. The artist employs his own body as both a performative medium and a site for phenomenological exploration and embodied confrontation.
In the two video works comprising The sky, the sand, the lashing waves, the artist’s body appears as a solitary figure immersed in nature: exposed, unguarded, and defenseless. He confronts the vast, unpredictable, and fundamental forces of nature, such as waves, wind, sunlight along with the compressive force of sand as well as the detrimental potency of water. The bodily gestures, whether passively inert or actively engaged, avoid any sense of theatricality or an exhilarating performance. Rather, they suggest a silent, ritualistic submission, a complete letting go. By stripping away compelled narratives and rejecting metaphor, we are left with a pure, unmediated experience, or corporeal phenomenology.
Phan Quang pushes his physical limits not to conquer or assert the will of survival, but to surrender quietly, completely. In the stillness of solitude, he does not resist but yields to be carried, to be undone and dismantled. The body is no longer a vessel of control but a site of openness / a threshold for profound meditative states. And suddenly, something returns: frail, bare, but true. A self remade, one attuned to the tiniest pulses of being—the ‘in and out’ of breath, the hush between heartbeats, the weight of silence, the ebb and flow—as steady and unending as waves against the shore or sand drifting in the wind.
This embodied experience is not solely documented and displayed in the two video installations, but it is also diffused and reflected throughout the exhibition space via photographic pieces and an installation portrait made of crushed sand and cracked mirror shards. Here, the dialectic between seeing and being seen, the portrait of the ‘Other’ and one’s own reflected image, as well as the phenomenological tension between observer and observed produce an ambiguous liminal space. This seemingly infinite silence unexpectedly invites the audience to immerse themselves, confront, and engage. Like waves striking the shore and receding, is this accretion or erosion? Fullness or emptiness? These ontological inquiries resonate as reverberations inviting individual contemplation and interpretation. For Phan Quang, he has arrived at a personal epiphany: “Within the depths of suffering lies the seed of happiness.”
Phan Quang (b. 1976, Vietnam) currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City and Dalat. He studied Economics, graduating from University of Economics HCMC in 1999; subsequently working for various well-known photographers before starting his own commercial photographic studio ‘Stop & Go’ in 2004. Drawn to the power of photography as a medium that can both disturb and reflect ideas of truth, Phan Quang’s artistic practice today also encompasses sculpture, installation and video, often produced in close collaboration with local artisans and farmers in Bao Loc. His work was given solo feature at Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City in 2010, in addition to inclusion in recent group exhibitions hosted by the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, USA and the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum, Vietnam in 2012; the Institute Francais of Cambodia and Kumho Museum of Art, South Korea in 2011.
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