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LOS ANGELES — The small undertaking room that homes Vietnamese artist Trương Công Tùng’s exhibition on the Institute of Modern Artwork, Los Angeles (ICA LA) — his first solo museum present — is darkish save for a couple of lights which can be embedded inside an set up and two movies: “Dance of the bugs” (2020), which is suspended from the ceiling, the place bugs crawl throughout a recording of a night newscast, and “The misplaced panorama” (2021), a sequence of close-up pictures of the eyes of taxidermied animals from varied pure historical past museums. The taxidermied animals are frozen between states of demise and life, caught between being residing creatures and objects of show.
Displayed all through the room is “the state of absence – voices from exterior” (2020–ongoing), an set up of gourds which have been related by way of a sequence of plastic tubes, which cross water, dust, and seeds among the many gourds, and visibly entangle with one another. A few of the gourds include effervescent water, which must be refilled periodically, whereas others have mechanical components hooked up to them that make them hum, wiggle, or ring at varied intervals. The gourds are sealed in lacquer, which each protects them and enhances the distinction of the floor after it has been polished.
On the entrance of the undertaking room hangs “Lengthy Lengthy Legacies” (2021–ongoing), a curtain product of picket beads sewn collectively right into a net-like kind. These beads are created from rubber, espresso, cashew, and forest tree wooden from the central highlands of Vietnam, assets which have been exploited because of warfare and industrialization. Like people, every bead carries its personal distinctive relationship to this historical past. The piece displays the dangerous results of colonization, warfare, and speedy industrialization but additionally the group and belonging that weave a gaggle collectively in consequence. Is the beaded internet — and its embedded histories — a protecting casing, just like the lacquer surfaces of the gourds, or is it a jail that traps and ossifies collective trauma right into a nationwide id?
As I frolicked with the exhibition, I discovered myself asking questions in regards to the diasporic expertise. Does the shared trauma of a nation prolong to its residents and its diaspora throughout the globe and even throughout generations in the identical means that the dust, seed, and water journey freely all through the set up? How do nationwide and particular person identities change because the diaspora is influenced an increasing number of by a distinct context, as a number of entangled layers of particular person and collective materials migrate and intermingle with one another?
Trương’s exhibition is a meditation on the complicated interdependent variables that represent a diasporic expertise, one that provides no simple or concrete solutions. It examines what’s shared, misplaced, and adjusted as communities migrate throughout the globe and metamorphose. The artist’s work is skeptical of finality and is as a substitute within the methods through which historical past and geography form id formation. For Trương, the boundaries between residing and non-living, between the previous and the current, between particular person and collective id, are porous and continuously shifting, passing materials backwards and forwards by way of a multilayered sequence of interconnected paths.
Trương Công Tùng continues on the Institute of Modern Artwork (1717 East seventh Avenue, Arts District, Los Angeles) by way of September 10. The exhibition was organized by Amanda Sroka, senior curator, with Caroline Ellen Liou, curatorial assistant.
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