MINH H PHAN

INSTALLATION • PERFORMANCE • WORLD BUILDING

What We Do

MINH H PHAN

LA based artist and world builder.


Recent residencies at UC Davis/Manetti Shrem Gallery and LA food justice organization Food Forward lead to installations (sculptural, performance, digital media) responding to the intersections of food, memory, and ancestral knowledge by intervening materiality, systems, time, space, and the status quo.


When not working on her own projects, Minh can be found collaborating across disciplines and workshopping ethnographic based world building. With decades of experience in food as subject and materiality, she advises, lectures, and stewards interdisciplinary work across university campuses (UCLA, Art Center), community organizations, and in public and private commissions. Her most installed and performed work GOOD FIRE has been iterated over 8,000 times and continues to be defined by fire and our relationship to it.


Forthcoming projects include a a VR catalogue of wild medicinal plants and ethnographies in dialogue with indigenous and non-dominant languages. She continues to work on the dozens of works and iterations of MÁT MÁT MẮT and forthcoming KEO KẸO KÉO a body of work that delves into candy as diplomacy, candy as survival, and the push and pull of sweetness equaling the glue that holds together trust and fluidity.


Minh leads PoCo (Porridge Collective), an artist led gallery and experimental lab centering performance, community, food, and reflection.


Past works include award winning PHENAKITE (2021 LA Times Restaurant of the Year; 2021 + 2022 Michelin Stars) and community-driven porridge + puffs.

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Contact Us

[email protected]

MÁT MÁT MẮT
2023-2026
118 visual, multimedia, sensorial works
28 performance compositionsThe weight of trauma is both burden and gift carried on a yoke. A deep squat (aka the Asian squat) atop two Michelin tires intervenes colonization as well as de-colonization. Pounded rice and gypsum sculpt permanence and decay. Performance itself is called into question, hidden right in the name.MÁT MÁT MẮT is an evolving intersection of ritual, language, food, and ecology to explore ancestral memory, colonial histories, and transcultural healing.A triptych of site-specific installations - Food Forward's Pit Stop in Los Angeles, UC Davis's Manetti Shrem Museum, and High Desert Test Sites/A-Z West in Joshua Tree - anchors the work. Each iteration is unique in terroir, time, space, and community. Each a vessel to share grief, reconciliation, and collective memory.

Links
Nanette Orly's "The Weight of Michelin"
High Desert Test Sites
Manetti Shrem Museum Review/Comstock
Food Forward Artist in Residence/LA Times

GOOD FIRE
2020 - ongoing
8,000-ish performances
10,000-ish handmade mochisEight thousand is not a count of finished acts, each controlled burn is an interval, a duration, a reminder that life and death exist within the same breath.First Nations in California have long fought for the right to have controlled and cultural burns. California and the United States' main wild fire policy was Smokey the Bear’s message of fire suppression, leaving out the stewards with the most data and having a time immemorial track record. With other California First Nations, the Karuk Tribe has fought for the right to maintain land with pyro-diversity, a richness that only repetition of controlled burns can produce.GOOD FIRES in a parking lot under LA's 4th Street Bridge, at the Hammer and Manetti Shrem Museums, the MAK Center/Schindler House, LACMA, atop a NYC high rise, on stage at the US Open, tableside at PHENAKITE and COTE and other Michelin restaurants, and at times breaching protocols at major institutions.Guest by guest, mochi by mochi, a durational love letter to California wildfires and its land stewards. A reflective question asked by an involuntary political refugee carried to these lands as a toddler:WHO GETS TO BE ON THE LAND WE STAND ON?Developed in dialogue with Bill Tripp of the Karuk Tribe, amplifying the Karuk Tribe's sovereign right to controlled burns in California. Historic bill AB 1699 (The Good Fire Act) was finally passed in 2025. All mochis made with California Sho Chiku Bai from nearly 100 year old Koda Farms (interrupted by US Executive Order 9066 when the family was sent to Japanese Internment Camps).

Links
HAMMER MUSEUM 2024
Robin Koda + Minh H Phan: GOOD FIRE/Active Cultures
AB BILL 1699 The Good Fire Act
Good Fire/California Practice

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KEO KẸO KÉO


Glue, Candy, Scissors
When to hold, when to pull, when to push, when to stretch, when to heat, when to cool, when to cut.


Is it sweet or is it saccharine?


Is it a gift, a ledger or an act of saving face?


From colonial and imperial times to well-meaning contact, the practice contradicts, challenges yet will never cease to be practiced nor celebrated.


Delicate wit, gentle nuance, kinship warmth, expansive understanding.


Generosity at its heart.


This is candy diplomacy.
The future is sweet.
And a little hard, stretchy, sour, salty, and bitter.

REFLECTIONS
2026Can one smell time? What does a thought taste like?What can be enhanced? What can be captured?What can only happen in stillness and accepting time and space?Inspired by Grace Lee Boggs (in the documentary by Grace Lee), a set of chairs with side seats sit low to the ground, built for reflecting (which were originally built for winning Michelins, made of scraps from a past installation). This on-going series is a seed and a movement to connect, be active by doing nothing but being present, passively inviting the senses to explore the passing of time.

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A CYCLE OF ABUNDANCE


"ĂN QUẢ NHỚ KẺ TRỒNG CÂY" is a six syllable Vietnamese tục ngữ (proverb) clumsily translated by Google: "When eating the fruit, remember the one who planted the tree."


Expressed in gratitude with a drive to serve future generations, these six words weave and serve as a north star for a world imagined, constructed, practiced and shared. The grounding of food to nature, land, labor, language, community and ancestors is at times a heavy obligation. But to think about it as an ecosystem allows fluidity to be the seed, the caretaker, the grower, the fruit, the recipient of the fruit, the fallen fruit, as well as water, fire, wind and other forces and resources from nature.


When I started my Food Forward artist in residency in 2024, I wanted to explore the tangible and material ecosystem of food and food waste. What I didn't know at the time was this seed of work was to become a long trajectory leading to a deeply reflective and researched body of work, shaking up my own ecosystem.


Looking at this specific relic and iteration of work, this proverb stripped of diacritics (a repeated habit of this diasporic who feels comfortable with ambiguity), is exactly where I needed to start and end.


More of the work can be found here as well as an interview with Kenneth Nguyen (on being ambiguous) reflecting another iteration of the work.

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