Trùng mú - Endless, sightless

After travelling in various countries, Nguyen Phuong Linh noticed a uniformity in the types of work available to working-class Vietnamese diaspora women in urban centres around the world. Beauty parlours and nail salons became locations the artist could hear her mother tongue spoken. Based on this observation, she created Trùng mú - Endless, sightless (2018), a beauty parlour, a site for the maintenance of standards of beauty, is treated as a still life. Sounds heard include the ambient noise of laser treatments for the removal of dark pigmentation in favour of the fashion for whitening skin. Smoke filters the room obscuring what we can and cannot see, drawing attention to our constant conditioning and desire for surface qualities. The opaqueness of light through white is also a metaphor for the blind spots in history: beyond official narratives, the more you look, the blinder you become. The video was produced by the Hans Nefkens Foundation.