Thu Van Tran: Contamination, Colour, and the Ambiguities of History
Words by Katja McMillan
Born 1979 in Hanoi, Vietnam, but living and working in Paris, France, Thu Van Tran leads us through violently beautiful landscapes which explore the artist's relationship with materials and colours, interwoven through the political, historical, and personal. Alongside their exploration of Vietnam's colonial history, their work exhibited in the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection also speaks as a reaction to the colour-coded operations employed by the United States military as part of their herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War.
American planes spraying ‘Rainbow Herbicides’ onto swathes of Vietnamese jungle during Operation Trail Dust, USAF photo.
During these years, the enchantingly dubbed Operation Trail Dust sprayed so-called 'Rainbow Herbicides'-- Agent Green, Agent Pink, Agent Purple and later Agent Orange and Blue--over rural areas of South Vietnam with the goal of destroying the jungle concealing Viet Cong fighters. The use of Agent Orange in particular was widespread, taking up 61% of the total of 81 million litres of the chemicals spilled onto the Vietnamese jungle. Because it is a stable molecule, the stain of the dioxin-like compounds in the Rainbow Herbicides contaminates both the environment and human body. The consequences of exposure to Agent Orange appear in numerous health issues including blindness and cancers, even generations later. The Vietnamese government estimates 400,000 deaths as a result of the adverse health conditions caused by Agent Orange and millions of people with health problems (notably, these numbers have been described by the US government as unreliable). Alongside its devastating effects on human life, Agent Orange also destroyed 40% of the total forest area of southern Vietnam, marring the ecosystem for decades.
The Colors of Gray, Thu Van Tran, Bourse de Commerce, 2012 - ongoing.
It is these themes of colour and contamination that emerge in the Colours of Grey, which takes up the space nearly ceiling to floor and is currently exhibited at the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection in Paris. The overwhelming grey hue is composed of a mix of these Rainbow Herbicides, of green, pink, orange, purple and blue which layer over one another into a grey in between, existing within a space that is neither white nor black: a space of ambiguity, ambivalent multitudes. By occupying this position between extremes, grey denies a position of either, just as history exists outside a gradient of white and black, good and evil.
As Agent Orange permeates the land and memory of Vietnam and the political manipulates memory, these colours layered together create a new visual effect, a sickening grey cloud which mimics the clouds of chemicals expelled from American planes onto Vietnam. The unnatural colours, of which orange is perhaps the most noticeable, bleed out from the edges, ever present. This bleeding effect is an attempt to free the colours of the linguistic devices of the American operations in Vietnam which bind them to their history there, and reflect the artist's fascination with the fragile, yet powerful linking of language to the political and how this language stirs the imagination.
Workers on a French colonial rubber plantation, late 1800s, Alpha History.
This themes of stains and white spaces also emerge in Penetrable, Thu Van Tran's other work currently exhibited in the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection and created in situ. By targeting the white walls of the museum, the artist intervenes directly with the historical space, which has its roots as a colonial bastion in the 19th century. Much of Thu Van Tran's work deals with their fascination with rubber, the milky whiteness of which is stained with the blood of centuries of European exploitation. After importing the substance from the Americas, explorers found that the trees which produced it could only grow in tropical climates and brought it to their colonies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Southern Vietnam in particular appeared as an ideal climate for rubber trees, enabling French colonial officials to establish large foreign plantations on land seized from local farmers, where Vietnamese labourers worked under cruel conditions. The treatment of these workers was indicative of the general suffering inflicted by six decades of French colonialism in Vietnam, which focused mainly on the production of raw materials and cheap labour under the guise of a civilizing mission.
Penetrable, Thu Van Tran, Bourse de Commerce, 2023.
Penetrable is not created on a blank wall; rather, the artist glued and then tore off rubber, leaving stains which reject the traditional white onto which history, and art, is placed. By having the two materials, the white wall, and the rubber, meet, the artist sabotaged this whiteness, contaminated it. The toxic purple colour of the piece, sprayed onto the walls, again mimics the toxins poured onto Vietnam during the American war and spoils its purity. The colour seems to sink deep, like a bruise which has been uncovered within the building.
The exhibit is ultimately a visceral exploration of these manmade materials, rubber and the Rainbow Herbicides, and our relationship to matter, created by hands like ours and woven into violent histories, leading the viewers to contemplate how these materials bleed through the white walls of history.
