‘Trung Mu – Endless Sightless’, is the most recent video work by Vietnamese Nguyen Phuong Linh and adopts an uncharacteristically surrealist aesthetic to tap on her experiences as a contemporary nomadic artist. The work’s central theme is that of a staged beauty parlour and its driving concept is today’s migration of Vietnamese around the world where they find themselves part of the beauty industry ecosystem.The viewers of this video are made to feel as though they are intruding on an intimate engagement, and indeed the beautifying industry is one that is private on several fronts. The process of beautification is one that is not revealed openly in public for fear of societal judgment (incidentally, it is societal judgment or perceived and projected societal judgment and prejudices that drive this booming industry). Treatments are undertaken behind closed doors, and further masked by curtain partitions with occasional beams of light and odd clicking noises being the only elements that betray the activities carried out behind these concealers.Enfolded and encoded within the private spaces of the beauty parlour are considerations of what it means to be an alien in a foreign land. The dreamlike yet clinical composition of ‘Trung Mu’ lends itself to the odd but frequently paired emotions of hope and alienation experienced by migrants first in leaving their homes and then in arriving at new lands. Linh Phuong Nguyen (b. 1985, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, sculpture and video. Her work conveys a sense of the alienation, dislocation and ephemerality of human life, and looks at the geographical cultural shifts, traditional roots and fragmented history of Vietnam.
