Exhibitions

‘An Unbearable Lightness between Sky and Water’ by Lien Truong – Galerie Quynh

Galerie Quynh

Jan 13 - Feb 07, 2024

^{THE AGE BETWEEN LAND AND AIR, 2023, oil, acrylic, do paper on linen and silk, 213.5 × 183.5 cm
All images courtesy Galerie Quynh. Artworks copyright Lien Truong}

Galerie Quynh is holding ‘An Unbearable Lightness between Sky and Water’ – a solo exhibition by Lien Truong featuring some of her most ambitious work to date. The show weaves together languages of paint, textile, and food, forming a hybrid, diasporic language of love dedicated to Truong’s late mother who passed in April last year. Built on a practice long examining material ideologies and notions of heritage, the works blend painting techniques and philosophies with military, textile, and food histories, alongside a timeline of Truong’s family’s migration from north to south Vietnam, then to the United States.

About the Artist

Lien Truong’s practice examines cultural and material ideologies and notions of heritage. By fusing painting techniques, materials and philosophies, and military, textile, food and art histories, she creates hybrid forms interrogating the relationship between aesthetics and doctrine and addresses the dynamics of domination, assimilation, and resistance across cultures. Truong often incorporates practices like embroidery and silk painting to dissect social, cultural, and political history, investigating the influences that shape contemporary identity and belief systems.

Truong has held exhibitions in many institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Van Every | Smith Galleries, Davidson, NC; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC; the Centres of Contemporary Art in Moscow and Yekaterinburg; Oakland Museum of California; and Pennsylvania Academy of Art, PA. Truong is the recipient of many awards and fellowships including the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2019. She has received fellowships from the Institute of the Arts and Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowships; and has held residencies at the Oakland Museum of California, Jentel Foundation, and the Marble House Project. Her work is in major collections such as the Linda Lee Alter Collection, Philadelphia, PA; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Post Vidai Collection, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Geneva, Switzerland; Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam among others.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Truong immigrated to the US in 1975. She received her MFA from Mills College, Oakland, CA. Truong is based in Chapel Hill where she is also Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.