LIEN TRUONG FROM THE EARTH RISE RADIaNT BEINGS
Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 Design:©2022info@turnercarrollgallery.comturnercarrollgallery.com505.986.9800TurnerCarrollGalleryDarcySpencerandJeffery Kuiper Essay: Miranda Metcalf Artwork photographs: Peter Paul Geoffrion Front and Back Cover: The Tangled Web We Weave, 2022 oil, silk, acrylic, chiffon, linen, vintage Japanese fabric on canvas 60 x 72"
Turner Carroll Gallery is proud to mount a solo exhibition of new work by Lien Truong. In her practice, aesthetic delights confront historical real ities as Truong takes figure, landscape, and technique into the realm of Asian Futurism.
In Truong’s practice human figures are powerful tools in the recontextualization of iconography used by European and American artists to up hold past colonial narratives. Women were sexualized while at the same time overly diminutive and fulfilling expectations of the Western gaze. Truong gives these figures agency, recasting them in the palest yellow and transforming them into silhouettes. In this form, they are divorced from the skin, cloth, and ornamentation, which historically stood in for the personhood of an Asian woman. Portraits of historical women also appear, such as Teresa Magbanua y Ferraris, a military leader in the Philippines who organized and fought against the colonial forces of Spain, the U.S., and Japan. Truong says of her work that she searches “for a form that bares my own experience but also tests out the art historical hierarchies assigned to such cultural forms.”
Truong’s techniques hold as much significance as her subjects. Thick and gestural oil painting is juxtaposed against flowing hand-painted silk. Strips of silk cascade down the canvas, so the slightest breeze or viewer walking past causes it to vibrate over the surface. Using silk in such a context can’t help but bring to mind visions of the exotic “East.” Truong manages to reference and reject colonialism and orientalism through these forms, replacing them with narratives of resistance, strength, beauty, and love.
LIEN TRUONG FROM THE EARTH RISE RADIANT BEINGS
While landscapes are often thought of as banal or neutral subject matter, there is, in fact, a deeply politicized tradition within the United States linked to colonization and the problematic force of Manifest Destiny. Fictitious and constructed spaces of the American landscape painting by artists such as Thomas Moran and John Gast upheld narratives that glorified the United States’ colonial dominance of the land and the peoples of North America. Glorious depictions of nature found in such places as Yellowstone and Yosemite imbued landscapes with nationalis tic pride and spiritual gravitas. As a Vietnamese-born, U.S. citizen, Truong steps into this tradition not only as an American but also as a person whose family lived the consequences of colonialism and civil conflict firsthand. Truong’s father worked in the embroidery business in Vietnam and was the third generation of his family to do so. During the French colonization of the country, their family lost their factory and home in Hanoi. They moved the factory and the workers to Saigon to save the business. Years later, during the Fall of Saigon in 1975, her family fled again, yet this time they could not take any of the embroideries with them. Today, Truong uses fabric, thread, and paint to reassemble older narratives within the context of this history.
From the Earth Rise Radiant Beings, 2021, oil, silk, acrylic, copper pigment, enamel on canvas, 72 x 96"
Lien Truong
From the Earth Rise Radiant Beings transforms figures from 18th and 19th century Orientalist paintings, to silhouettes painted in the palest yellow hue. The figures reject their sexualized and submissive origins. They are recast; the forms are given agency, weaponized, and engage in acts of self-love. The paintings examine how gestures can both refer to and reject oppressive epistemologies. Bodies emerge out of silk anamorphic shapes, cradled by the uncanny silhouettes. The works are a type of Asian futurism, born from the violent histories descended from Orientalist ideologies; and the trauma, strength and love transcending transnational and generational boundaries, to create narratives of resistance and autonomy.
FROM THE EARTH RISE RADIANT BEINGS
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4 My mother, she fell from the sky, 2021, oil, silk, acrylic, copper pigment, and enamel on canvas, 72 x 96"
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Courtesy and collection of Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
6 According to the Spectre of Blood and Water, 2019, oil, silk, acrylic, vintage Japanese textile, gold and copper pigment, 72 x 96"
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Courtesy and collection of Adrienne Johns and Jim Whitely
8 Blessed is the Black Silk on Your Dark Little Head, 2021, oil, silk, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72", diptych
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10 Under the Canopy of a Pink Palm, 2020, mixed media and silk on canvas, 84 x 72", diptych
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In Mutiny in the Garden, my painted gestures serve as visual traces to human bodies, adorned with historic textile designs and appear to penetrate in and out of the painted surface. Landscapes indicted in violence and tragedy visually fracture with images and icons of civ il rights in oil and on silk. Vietnamese embroidery, antique obi mourning cloth, and linen laser cut with the 18th century designs of Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, Jean Gabriel Charvet’s 18th century wallpaper depicting the explorations of Captain James Cook, and Spain’s Triumfa España en las Americas, a pictorial textile created to reassure viewers of Spain’s dominance in its American colonies, are collaged onto the paintings. I interpret moments and symbols that have shaped racial, cultural and religious conflict and assimilation in America. Through a type of blended narrative painting, my work refers to the complex cultural histories that mirror the American lens. Lien Truong
MUTINY IN THE GARDEN
12 …and still we banter with the Devil, 2017, oil, silk, acrylic, 19th century cotton, antique 24k gold-leaf obi thread on canvas, 72 x 96"
In Des Espace Autres, Michel Foucault describes the concept of heterotopias as a non-hegemonic space of otherness, which simultaneous ly mirrors, distorts and inverts other spaces within a culture. According to his third principal of heterotopia, it is capable of juxtaposing in a single space, several real spaces and sites that are in themselves incompatible and foreign to one another. Foucault gives as example the ancient garden in the Orient as a universalizing heterotopia representing a microcosm of diverse environments. Rejecting the romanticized aesthetic of early American landscape paintings, my paintings interpret the heterotopian space as a frenetic amalgamation of historical and art historical references, interpreted through a hybridity of American and Asian painting techniques, materials and philosophies.
Mutiny in the Garden examines the political conditions embodied in America’s founding agrarian philosophy as a nation formed through colo nization, diverse immigrant groups and enslaved labor. I revise themes in Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire, a series of allegorical paintings in which that explores the rise and fall of empire through a style of landscape suffused with historical associations, and moralistic narratives.
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14 The Tangled Web We Weave, 2022, oil, silk, acrylic, chiffon, linen, vintage Japanese fabric on canvas, 60 x 72"
15The Breaking of Bone with Stone, 2022, oil, silk, acrylic, chiffon, 19th century American cotton on canvas, 60 x 72"
Weatherspoon
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women, Philadelphia, PA Post-Vidai, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Melbourne Institute of Technology, Hanoi City, Vietnam
Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, Davidson, NC Art Museum, Greensboro, NC
16 char-truce, 2019, oil, silk, acrylic, antique 24k gold-leaf silk obi thread, silk obi thread on canvas, 30 x 30" MUSEUM AND NOTABLE COLLECTIONS
Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC D.C. Collection, Disaphol Chansiri, Bangkok, Thailand
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Royal
Humboldt State University, Humboldt, CA
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18 Cunning is the Monster with Gilded Fangs, 2019, acrylic, silk, laser cut linen, oil on paper, 30 x 22"
19When the Sun Sheared a Vessel, 2019, acrylic, silk, antique Japanese fabric on paper, 30 x 22"
Artist-in-Residence, Jentel Foundation, Banner, WY
AWARDS | RESIDENCIES
Jimmy and Judy Cox Asia Initiative Award, Carolina Asia Center, Chapel Hill, NC
2003 Artist-in-Residence, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA
2009 Finalist, Outwin, Boochever Portrait Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
Artist-in-Residence, The Marble House Project, Dorset, VT
2015 Junior Faculty Award, Provost’s Office, UNC Chapel Hill
Artist-in-Residence, Sweeney Granite Mountains Research Center, University of California at Riverside, Kelso, CA
2007 Artist Grant, Hanoi University of Culture, Hanoi, Vietnam
2022 Artist-in-Residence, Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL
2019 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, NY Klinberg Faculty Research Fund, UNC Chapel Hill
2016 North Carolina Artist Fellowship, North Carolina Arts Council, Raleigh, NC
2006 Merit Award, The Marin Society of Artists National Juried Exhibition Juror: René de Guzman, Curator, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
Ingrid Nickelson Artist Trust Grant, Humboldt, CA
2017 Whitton Fellow, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill
MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
Shapeshifters, curated by Joe Hedges, Terrain Spokane, Spokane, WA
In(di)visible, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC
Interwoven: Natural and Illusory Textiles, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC
2022 Illuminated Curiosities, curated by Ace Lee, Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
2017 Art on Paper, Curated by Emily Stamey, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC
2020 Wild Lands, curated by Gina Tuzzi, Artist Alliance, artistalliance.space She Persists, Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC
Reckoning and Resilience: North Carolina Art Now, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC
Where the Heart Is: Contemporary Art by Immigrant Artists, Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA
Front Burner, Highlights in North Carolina Painting, curated by Ashlynn Browning, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
2019 The Sky is Not Sacred, Eli Marsh Gallery, Amherst College, Amherst, MA
Objectifying Myself: Works by Women Artists from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT
2021 From the Earth Rise Radiant Beings, Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC
2018 Permanent Collection, West Building, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Port Futures and Social Logistics, Lamar Dodd School of Art and College of Environment and Design, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
turnercarrollgallery.com | 725 Canyon Road | Santa Fe, NM 87501 | 505.986.9800
