Thao Nguyen Phan, Winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award 2018, will create a new work with her $15,000 prize.  © Thao Nguyen Phan

ART NEWS: Thao Nguyen Phan wins the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award 2018, and $15,000  to create new work.

BY KAZAD

BARCELONA –Thao Nguyen Phan has won inaugural Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award 2018. The annual award is in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró.  As the winner, Thao Nguyen Phan will receive $15,000 in funding for the production of a new work. The new works will be presented at the Fundació Joan Miró in November 2019 to coincide with LOOP Barcelona 2019.

Thao Nguyen Phan was selected from a shortlist of nine artists, comprising Wong Ping, Nao Yoshigai, Hsu Chia-Wei, Issac Chong, Ho Tzu Nyen, Yin-Ju Chen, Au Sow Yee and Wu Chi-Yu by a judging panel of seasoned art professionals chaired by Han Nefkens, Founder of the Han Nefkens Foundation. Members of the jury included Emilio Alvarez, Founding co-director of LOOP Barcelona, Marko Daniel, Director of the Fundació Joan Miró, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentine Galleries, and Barbara London, author, curator, and professor.

The panel notes that Phan was selected “for her heterogeneous and powerful works, which are unique, poetic forms of storytelling.”

Born in 1987 in Vietnam, Thao Nguyen Phan explores a unique approach in her work that integrates global ideas in a poetic and visually powerful way.  The jury describes her thus:

Promising young artist Thao Nguyen Phan has a great eye and, remarkably, for an artist of her age, she has found a voice that is both unique and incisive. Her diverse practice includes complex, layered narratives, which create a form of storytelling that is at once grounded in her local landscape and in the communities with whom she works, while at the same time referring back to fictional texts.

The annual Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award was established in 2018.  Its main objective is to increase contemporary artistic production in the video art field by supporting artists of Asian origin or nationality.

At only 31 years old and winner of the inaugural Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Barcelona Video Art Award,   there is a great expectation that Thao Nguyen Phan will be able to take full advantage of this opportunity to produce a new work that will further her career. The Han Nefkens Foundation will present the work created by the artist with the $15,000 award in various art centers worldwide throughout 2019 and 2020.

Tropical Siesta (2015–2017), a 2-channel video installation that tells an imaginary tale of a rural Vietnam populated only by children by Phan Thao Nguyen.

Phan Thao Nguyen/YouTube