Through text, image and performance Nam Chau examines the haunting relics of memories falsely constructed, questions unasked, and answers still floating in the ether. She grew up in a small town in France, the country that her mother had moved to as a refugee from the Vietnam War, then moved to Berlin via Untermeitingen in Bavaria, and now works from her Mitte studio.
Influenced by “videos of cats on the internet… pornography and old black and white photos”, her work combines an unusual collision of subject matter and process that she works on prolifically, starting at 6.00am and only stopping, “when I think that I don’t see what I am doing anymore”. In “My Mother’s Camp”, Nam Chau uses the internet to extract imagery from a time period her mother won’t discuss, forming her own imagined access to her heritage through photos of other people in the refugee camp to which she has never made a pilgrimage to; Chau herself holds no pictures of this place, banished as it is from memory.
Blurred figures emerge from the brushstrokes, connecting the artist’s hand engaged in the act of re-representation with a distant moment, manifesting from the fog of history. Nam Chau also maintains an interest in American movies of the Vietnam War (“Full Metal Jacket” and so on) where, she says, “Vietnamese women are either prostitutes or fighters”, and intends to create a new series of these entitled, “That’s Me”.
Intrigued by this past which is never discussed (her mother once said, “why should I keep a memory of something I don’t want to know”), her paintings have a hazy quality, as if she is peering through the mist as she considers, “Can I paint what I cannot imagine? Is the painting able to say something that I do not want to know? Are my hands able to paint what I can’t remember?”
Text by Susanna Davies-Crook