Curious Reincarnations: Counter-Histories of Diem Phung Thi by Roger Nelson

Part of Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney convened by Mary Roberts and Nicholas Croggon, presented by the discipline of Art History at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.

Thursday 11 September, 2025 03:00PM - 04:30PM. Schaeffer Library Seminar Room 210, Mills Building (A26) Free. This research seminar series is also accessible via Zoom Join via Zoom

A presentation on the recently recovered artist Diem Phung Thi, and on the implications of their remarkable work for art history in Southeast Asia. 

Thao Nguyen Phan, Reincarnations of Shadows, 2023–ongoing. Three-channel video with sound, 16 mins, 50 seconds. Digital still. © Thao Nguyen Phan, courtesy of the artist.

How do artists and curators contribute to (and complicate) the making of art histories (in Southeast Asia)? In this paper, I discuss the extraordinary recent rediscovery of an under-studied modernist artist: a renewal of interest initiated by contemporary artists and curators, and now being followed by museums and collectors. 

Beginning in 2017 and intensifying since 2023, there has been a striking resurgence of attention to the modular artworks of the modernist sculptor, Diem Phung Thi (1920–2002). Projects presented in Saigon, Milan, Paris, and elsewhere by the internationally acclaimed artist Thao Nguyen Phan (1987—) as well as presentations in Hanoi by the curator Lê Thuận Uyên (1991—) have led to Diem being considered (in Lê’s words) “one of the pioneering figures in Vietnam’s art of the 20th century.” Yet Diem had previously been little-known outside of specialist circles in Vietnam, and is absent from canonical national, regional, and continental accounts of modern art in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and Asia. 

What has drawn contemporary practitioners to Diem’s idiosyncratic and modular artworks? I theorize recent moving-image projects by Phan and Lê as “counter-histories” which contribute to ongoing efforts towards decolonizing Southeast Asia’s art histories using discrepant, heterochronic methods.

People

Roger Nelson

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, currently Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, focusing on questions of historiography and method. His current book project on “artistic art histories” in the region is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. He is also co-editing a volume on the artist and activist Emiria Sunassa, under advance contract with Leiden University Press. He was the 2022 recipient of the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, presented by the Association for Asian Studies. He is a 2025 Sir William Dobell Fellow at the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory. Roger was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a scholarly journal published by NUS Press.