Trương Công Tùng
Drawing upon mystical ritual and indigenous mythologies, the work of Trương Công Tùng (b. 1986, Đắk Lắk province, Vietnam) is characterized by a poetic sensitivity to history, landscape, and materiality. His dynamic installations often incorporate natural materials that bear the traces of time and the echoes of generations and are composed in such a way as to reimagine the land from a site of colonial empire to one of communion. Disrupting the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds, Trương’s practice reconfigures elements of each to reframe the relationship between the living and the inanimate.
Trương’s first museum solo exhibition brings together a constellation of sculptural and video works produced over the last three years. At the gallery entrance is a curtain of wooden beads made from a combination of coffee, cashew, and forest trees, all of which have been exploited throughout the artist’s homeland in the Central Highlands of Vietnam due to the relentless forces of war and industrialization. Created in homage to the dislocated, extracted, and disappeared, the network of suspended beads invites visitors to reflect on their own connections to these complex histories of people and place. Also on view is an installation made from gourds, water, soil, and seeds. The gourds are joined by a web of clear plastic tubes through which flowing water and earth create an undercurrent of migration from one gourd to the next. Each is sealed with a glossy finish made using lacquer, a once-prized and heavily traded material that is derived from tree sap. In the lacquerware painting tradition, lacquer is added to an object’s surface and then polished to reveal the hidden layers beneath. For the artist, this unearthing is a sacred act.
Reminiscent of the forest depths with its darkness, shadows, and gentle hums of insects and other life, Trương Công Tùng’s living exhibition requires ongoing cultivation and care, allowing it to become a metaphor for, and a journey of, co-existence and transformation.
Trương Công Tùng (b. 1986, Đắk Lắk province; lives in Ho Chi Minh City) grew up in Đắk Lắk province among various ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands, Vietnam. He graduated from Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts University in 2010, majoring in lacquer painting. With research interests in science, cosmology, philosophy, and the environment, he works with a range of media, including video, installation, painting, and found objects, which reflect personal contemplations on the cultural and geopolitical shifts of modernization, as embodied in the morphing mythology of a land. He is also a member of Art Labor (founded in 2012), a collective working between visual art and social/life sciences to produce alternative nonformal knowledge via artistic and cultural activities in various public contexts and locales. Trương’s has exhibited extensively in Vietnam and abroad, both as a solo artist and as part of Art Labor. Recent exhibitions have been held at institutions including the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); Manzi Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam (2021); San Art, Ho Chi Minh City; Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City (2018); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2018); Kadist, San Francisco (2016); Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi (2016); and the Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (2016). He is also the recipient of the inaugural Han Nefkens Foundation—Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant 2023, in collaboration with Sàn Art, Vietnam; Sa Sa Art Projects, Cambodia; the Jim Thompson Art Center, Thailand; Museion, Italy; Busan Museum of Art, South Korea and Prameya Art Foundation, India.