Lien Truong

Region: South

Website: http://www.lientruong.com

City / State: Chapel Hill, NC

My work embraces Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias: sites that mirror, distort, and invert other spaces. The painted gestures nod to the mindfulness of the human mark within a space reminiscent of the void in Asian landscape painting. The gestures bear the uniform of regional textile designs, referring to a worldwide textile trade that for centuries has been a complicated narrative of migration, hierarchy, and power. This trade assigned the “East” with exotic mystery and identified it significantly as “the other.” The nonverbal aesthetics of textiles transcends language barriers, yielding a notable capacity to be culturally absorbed. The painted marks envelop, penetrate, and permeate one another among echoes of water and fluids, signifying the separation of nations and the dissolving of the painted bodies. These movements become phantoms of the chords of colonialism and conflict, creating a labyrinth of violence, migration, and coupling. The paint and space coalesce, creating entanglements of an eternally diasporic world.