Phung-Tien Phan’s exhibition Doesn’t Work at London’s Project Native Informant unfolds as a layered assemblage of relics and gestures, resisting the gravity of straightforward interpretation. Objects from domestic life are reconfigured into precarious alignments, their relationships unclear yet brimming with a quiet intensity that presses against their supposed mundanity. The works do not invite comprehension so much as they impose a demand to sit with their contradictions.
The exhibition begins with Volkswagen (Romeo and Juliet) (2025), a structure that exudes both theatricality and disarray. An Italian coffee machine holds a bouquet of flowers like a relic of care misplaced, while an image from Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995) dangles by a red ribbon from a hanging plant, its declaration (“Life is lonely, boring and dumb”) both starkly fatalistic and oddly matter-of-fact.
The construction divides itself into two spaces: one compartment houses a photograph of Toshiro Mifune, dimly illuminated by a bare bulb that grants his image the gravity of a shrine or a forensic exhibit. In the other, a diminutive bedroom unfurls in meticulous detail: a tiny bed, a desk, pots, and a pan that could all belong to a child. Embedded within the structure are enigmatic details – a loose cigarette tucked into the wall, two protruding sleeves – gestures that feel both poetic and unmoored, their meanings suspended in a state of perpetual deferral. Phan describes the work as an ode to Romeo and Juliet, a narrative of impossible closeness, reflected here in the panels that seem to press inward, creating a claustrophobic embrace.
The gallery space unfolds as a meticulous theatre of intention, its walls cloaked in varnished green panels that encase the artist’s preparatory sketches as artefacts. The arrangement gestures toward the nouveau Victorian design revival, invoking a nostalgic palimpsest where sentimentality and irony converge. On one panel, a simple phrase is etched: “I’m just so sorry.” The apology reads as an open wound within the otherwise precise choreography of the space. Its resonance lingers — not as a demand for absolution but as a quiet rebellion against the suffocating polish of overdetermined meaning.
Here, intention saturates every element, yet the work refuses to collapse under the weight of its own gravitas. The existential ache is tempered by a sly humour, an irreverent insistence that seriousness need not preclude levity. This duality, at once poignant and self-aware, imbues the space with a dynamism that thwarts binary readings. Everything matters, but perhaps not too much. The varnished green panels thus become more than mere surfaces; but conduits of projection, their sheen reflecting the viewer’s complicity in constructing meaning.
At the heart of the exhibition, a table cleaved by a column – once an unassuming architectural feature of the gallery – becomes a charged site of rupture and metaphor. On its surface, the artist’s discarded clothing lies stuffed with cellophane, tampons, and menstrual pads. This tableau nods to the classic magic trick, Sawing a Lady in Half, not as mere spectacle but as an allegory for the violence and ambivalence of division. The artist explains that the work channels the shock and mystery of the illusion, paralleling the psychic and physical fracturing demanded by the dual roles of artist and educator, creator and product.
The work evokes the abject: a body rendered consumable yet persistently human. To be an artist, the piece suggests, is to exist in a liminal state, severed between creation as a process of selfhood and production as a mechanism of value within the relentless machinery of patriarchal capitalism. The clothing, stuffed with materials that signify both care and containment, becomes a potent symbol of this tension. Tampons and menstrual pads (mundane artefacts of embodied existence) anchor the work in corporeal reality, reminding us that beneath the spectacle of creative labour lies a body of blood and bone, unrelenting in its demands.
The exhibition’s title amplifies this interrogation of female creative labour, framing it within the broader pressures of a system that conflates domestic and professional spheres. The inclusion of masculine-coded clothing alongside menstrual pads underscores the dissonance: the artist must adopt resilience, perform competence, and continue to ‘make it work,’ even when fractured by exhaustion and expectation. The work does not romanticise this tension but instead lays it bare, presenting it as a raw and unresolved confrontation with the structures that shape women’s labour.
In this act of doubling – of being both creator and product, subject and object – the artist invites us to witness the precarity of such an existence. Yet the work resists defeat; even in its fracturing, it insists on the persistence of matter and meaning. Blood and bones prevail, unyielding in their assertion of life amidst the machinery of consumption.
A screen near the centre of the exhibition plays a montage featuring the artist and a stuffed toy dog named Snowy, a character borrowed from Tintin and repurposed to roam her apartment. The sequences are deceptively simple: Snowy bounces on the floor, chews on shoes, leaps onto countertops. These gestures, playful yet disconcerting, subtly reconfigure the home into an unfamiliar terrain. The domestic space reveals itself not through static observation but through the peculiar choreography of a stuffed interloper. The artist imbues Snowy with a sense of agency that animates and unsettles, highlighting how even the seemingly inert can disrupt.
The artist explains, “The dog becomes an actor in the movie,” suggesting a deliberate embrace of artifice. This framing extends beyond the video itself, implicating the viewer as both participant and subject within the unfolding spectacle. In the act of watching, we adopt our own performance – nodding, laughing, performing – becoming a mirror to the gallery’s social dynamics. The interplay between Snowy’s absurd actions and the viewer’s measured responses produces a quiet irony: the stuffed animal, stripped of intention, becomes a provocateur, while the audience, with its myriad intentions, becomes the object of critique.
The sequence of Snowy’s antics is punctuated by abrupt shifts to nonsensical statistics: pie charts, diagrams, data points. These inserts do not seek to contrast playfulness with logic but rather destabilise the frameworks by which we organise and interpret experience. The statistics, devoid of narrative, function less as symbols of order and more as interruptions, rupturing any coherent reading of the work. They highlight the futility of reducing experience—be it artistic or lived—to systems of quantification.
The video becomes a site of unresolved tension, not between binaries but within the multiplicity of meaning itself. Snowy does not oscillate between roles; rather, the stuffed dog inhabits a liminal state, neither alive nor inert, and in doing so, redefines the terms of engagement. Likewise, the viewer’s role is not fixed but fluid, shifting with each interaction. The montage invites not understanding, but attunement, a recognition of the ways we inhabit and construct knowledge through presence, observation, and the absurdity of our shared performances.
Through this recursive play of action and perception, Phan gestures toward a deeper critique of representation and the systems we use to make sense of the world. By drawing together disparate elements – toy dogs, domestic spaces, meaningless data – the work resists closure, instead leaving the viewer suspended in a space where every detail demands attention, and every assumption becomes a question.
The title, self-aware in its embrace of absurdity, gestures toward our own futile attempts to impose coherence onto that which deliberately resists it. Phan’s work does not invite comprehension through traditional logic but instead demands a deeper engagement with play, intuition, and the subconscious. It challenges the viewer to surrender the compulsion for clarity and instead inhabit the fragmented, performative nature of meaning itself. Phan’s work resists the closure demanded by logical reductiveness, instead requiring an engagement with what Gilles Deleuze might term the “plane of immanence,” where ideas, objects, and sensations coexist without hierarchical organisation.
The nonsensical here is not a failure but a deliberate strategy — a subversion of systems that privilege legibility over complexity. The ordinary is disrupted, and hierarchies are inverted in a temporary suspension of established order. The playful ruptures and nonsensical juxtapositions within the show destabilise not only the gallery as an institution but also the viewer’s own modes of perception, forcing a confrontation with the limits of their interpretive frameworks.
Phan thus constructs a world in which every actor – be it the artist, the viewer, or the gallery itself – is enmeshed in the production of meaning, where nonsensicality is not a failure of understanding but a strategy of resistance. The gallery becomes a space not for conclusive statements but for sustained curiosity, an arena where the uncertainty of interpretation is its own reward. Rather than resolve its tensions, the show thrives within them, offering a quiet yet radical rethinking of how we engage with art and the world it reflects.
