Artwork Description
Lien Truong – According to the Spectre of Blood and Water
Dimensions: 72 x 96″ finished size / 72 x 96″ unframed
Year: 2019
Medium: oil, silk, acrylic, vintage Japanese textile, gold and copper pigment
According to the Specter of Blood and Water, a painted landscape of Đà Lạt, birthplace of Truong’s mother, is fractured with large painted gestures, antique Japanese fabric, painted silk and fragmented interpretations from paintings of French Monarchs, integrated with gold cloud forms adorned with a historic French Orientalist textile design. The use of silk and textile designs is core to Truong’s practice, referring to the worldwide textile trade, a centuries-old, complicated narrative of migration, hierarchy and power. The nonverbal aesthetics of textiles transcends language barriers, yielding notable capacity to be culturally absorbed. Both of the artist’s parents spent their youth under the rule of French Indochina and the painting is visually bound in the chaos of notions of identity and heritage, when complicated by the influence of war and colonial powers. Truong blends a hybridity of canonical western and Asian painting techniques, materials and philosophies, interrogating the hierarchies assigned to these art historical forms.