Artwork: Vong Phaophanit, Neon Rice Field, 1993, Tate Britain, London
The Tate Britain has rehung its collection to mixed reviews, yet Vong Phaophanit’s installation Neon Rice Field (1993) in the Duveen space, has a meditative strangeness and quiet beauty that stands out.
Phaophanit was born in Laos, educated in France and now resides in London. Such cultural dislocations have had a profound influence on his work. Neon Rice Field is created with seven tons of dry, white long-grain rice with six parallel tubes of red neon light nestling in the furrows of what appears as a ploughed field. The juxtapositions of natural and unnatural substances; the connotation of the East (rice/agriculture) and West (neon/industry) is simplistic and not what Phaophanit intends. Instead there is a subtle subversion to such dichotomies, as in the past he’s used American sponsorship to supply the rice, while industrial production and its commercial associations is most often offshored to Asian countries such as China.
Phaophanit is more interested in opening up the potential for “possibilities of meanings”, and says: “Once you name all the meanings, something still remains, something left over. That’s how I work. For instance, I use rice not only as a material, a substance, a smell or a symbol of food in the East, but I want to shake things – see what falls down.”