KEVIN PHAN
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Phan Văn Phước
Single-channel projection
2024My paternal grandfather, Phan Văn Phước, died on December 31st, 2023. In his 34 years in America, he spent majority of his days in his home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I oftentimes wonder if this was his ideal for the family he would cultivate throughout his life. When immigrating from a postwar Vietnam, what did he forgo? What was robbed when America intervened? 

In this video, I contemplate this personal loss and acknowledge my grandfather’s continuous presence in our family. His soul will always permeate throughout his lineage. I see his spirit through this refashioning of temporalities, digital artifacts, and rememberance. 




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Kevin Quang Phan (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He earned his BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2020 and received an MFA in Photo/Media at the University of Washington in 2024. His work addresses the illegibility of Asians in the White supremacist state and how modes of illegibility can be used to reject homogeneity and push for Asian American autonomy and agency. 

Artist Statement

Through my works, I have acknowledged the varying realities of the Vietnamese American experience. I confront the labor expectations and violences imposed upon my family using both video and photographic archives. Generally, the Asian American experience is haunted by losses: loss of culture, loss of agency, and loss of livelihoods. Unfortunately, there exist myriad voids and gaps across Asian American histories due to historic exclusions of Asians since America’s inception. In my navigation of the family archive, I create works that address these gaps and recontextualize our pasts as potentials and futurities that reject gendered and racialized rhetoric afflicting Asian America. What could have been if the U.S. had not intervened in the American War in Vietnam? How can we make use of illegibility and unintelligibility to shirk consignments of the U.S. empire?