Work

Lien Truong | The Unbearable Lightness Between Water, Fire and Sky | 2023 | Acrylic, oil, silk, Dó paper on linen | 72 x 84 inches  (185.76 cm x 216.72 cm) | LT 17

Videos

This is the raw video file of the Linda Sormin/Lien Truong artist conversation at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery during the Inaugural Exhibition on September 10, 2022. The good news is you can view 2 brilliant artists unfiltered. The down side is the video is pretty rough, although I’ve cleaned up the audio to the extent possible. In the coming weeks there will be a second edited version of the talk, which will be posted when complete. Components for the edited version still have to be produced – stay tuned…

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is excited to announce our Inaugural Exhibition in Los Angeles at 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, 3rd Floor, with artists Lien Truong, North Carolina; Linda Sormin, New York and Luis A. Sahagun, California. The three artists in this exhibition offer practices immersed in complex visual and political American histories. They share personal, spiritual and cultural stories of migration during war, economic collapse and colonization. Their journeys come alive through a mélange of performative sculpture and painting, amplified by their respective interrogations of ancestral, racial, gender and ritual erasure.

BIO

Fragmenting historic paintings, art, film and the gaming industry, Lien Truong’s mixed media paintings inform “our collective notions of heritage.”

Creating a powerful fictive of female authority, Lien Truong presents Asian female protagonists who are forceful, autonomous counterpoints to Western misogyny. Four new paintings – a segue from Truong’s “From the Earth Rise Radiant Beings,” exhibited at Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College in 2021 – will be on view in our Inaugural Exhibition. Continuing her focus on the generational trauma and resilience of Asian women lived and portrayed throughout history, the new paintings address the mythical stature of archetypes – more specifically, The Maiden, The Mother, and The Crone. Truong employs herself and her family matriarchs from Vietnam as symbols, through figure, landscape and objects, in the new works – “details that consider the magical, resilient nature of the Asian female body, that has had to endure war and trauma.” In her manifestations, resilience is inherited, adapted, and resistant to prevailing cultural alienation.

In addition to large canvas works, Truong took on six double-sided paintings that present as cultural opposition to American dogma: “The smaller works take two images that critically look at the culturally complex inventions within American soil, alongside ingrained white supremacist ideologies, memory, with a focus on ritual, magic, masquerade, and fire.”

Truong’s oeuvre can be viewed as Asian Futurism, born from the violent histories descended from Orientalist ideologies. Her work tests the hybridity and historic hierarchies of global painting techniques, materials and philosophies as she fragments paintings, art, film, and family. She subverts color and values, staging a background layered with singed panels of painted floating silk and blended gestures of oil paint, amidst interpretations of historic textile patterns, and emblematic and hegemonic iconography.

Lien Truong is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated with a BFA in 1999 from Humboldt State University and an MFA from Mills College, Oakland in 2001. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery; North Carolina Museum of Art; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam; Art Hong Kong; S.E.A. Focus, Singapore; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. She is the recipient of several awards including the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Whitton Fellowship, and fellowships from the Institute for the Arts & Humanities and the North Carolina Arts Council. Residencies include the Oakland Museum of California and the Marble House Project, Vermont. Public collections include thethe Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University Art Museum, CA; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC;  Van Every Smith Galleries at Davidson College, NC; Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; DC Collection (Disaphol Chansiri, Chiang Mai, Thailand); North Carolina Museum of Art  and the Post Vidai and  Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Vietnam).

Press

News

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Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
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