One big spin and you can hope to win the main prize. Anyone who thinks back nostalgically to Sundays at the fair when they see the wheel of fortune or is reminded of supermarket prize draws will be taken aback when they take a closer look. With Thai Ho Pham’s wheel of fortune, there is neither a food voucher to be won nor a chance to spin again. Life bingo is about the big picture. Rich, poor, gender, political system – the wheel of fortune determines luck and misfortune, privileges and opportunities for advancement, in short: jackpot or loser.
Thai Ho Pham, who was born in Vietnam and came to Germany with his family via a Thai refugee camp, reflects on themes such as origin, identity, clichés and racism in the exhibition “Wonderful Clichés”. Using a kind of artistic journey from birth to the establishment of new values, the Berlin artist explores his own identity, but also racism in society in general.
In the video installation “The scent of the carpet”, the artist refers to a lost childhood that will never return. A carpet can be seen, with a bamboo stick in the background. What at first glance seems harmless, almost peaceful, quickly conjures up a diffuse, ominous premonition. It is similar with “The Last Grain of Rice”. What for others is a single, insignificant grain of rice quickly turns out to be highly symbolic. In a childhood characterized by poverty, wasting food, even a single grain of rice, is considered a sin. The feeling of being bad if even a single grain is left over from a meal is deeply rooted in the consciousness. The artistic examination of the grain of rice as a symbol of poverty reflects feelings of guilt, but also the privilege of freeing oneself from the beliefs and values of childhood and establishing new ones of one’s own.
In “The Golden Voyage”, a life jacket and a punk jacket face each other. In the interplay between the two objects, the life jacket symbolizes the only possessions with which refugees leave their country to follow the dream of the West. The punk jacket with patches such as “Paradise Lost”, on the other hand, exposes the dream as an illusion. While Western emigrants take their privileges and their right to opinion and criticism with them to other countries, refugees from non-Western countries are usually socially denied the right to criticism in their new homeland.
Before even thinking about home, the first generation of refugees and migrants initially focuses on foreignness. For the following generations, the foreignness they read becomes a more casual but constant companion in their search for identity. “You speak German so well” – the inscription on the mirror is a striking reference to one of the daily experiences of many people who read foreign languages. Something similar is hidden behind the wok pans, which are painted with typically perceived Asian landscapes. Named after numbers that are labeled like dishes on Asian menus, the artist condenses the clichéd expectations of Vietnamese immigrants and their background on the pans: “Asia Kitsch to go”. The exhibits by the “Yakuza Fairy Tales” group also point in this direction. “Flower Mafia”, “Ling Ling”, “Golden Dragon” – the terms tattooed on the fingers are those that are repeatedly used in a clichéd and racist way in relation to Vietnamese immigrants. The name “Yakuza” refers to Japanese criminal organizations that have named themselves after the number combination “8-9-3”, which is considered worthless in the card game Oicho-Kabu. It is therefore not without pride that the yakuza describe themselves as worthless, thus freeing themselves from the role of victim.