POTRAIT OF ABSENCE
In project “The Sap Still Runs”2019 - ongoing
Printed text
I have heard people say: "My eyes are deceiving, forgetting, not knowing the truth". Jacques Dournes, in “Souls and Dreams” chapter, in the book “Southern Indochina Tribes”, translated by Nguyen Ngoc
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A gossamer thread that links many disparate works by Trương Công Tùng is his fixation on metamorphosis, material or immaterial. In the work A Portrait of Absence, for instance, he appropriates a Central Highlander’s oral line about their cosmic worldview, recorded by ethnographer Jacques Dournes as follows, “I have heard people say: ‘My eyes are deceiving, forgetting, not knowing the truth.’” Beyond the indigenous belief in the inner spirit always in disguise and shapeshifting, the work is also about the instability or slippage of authorship: a Central Highlander speaks, a missionary-cum-ethnographer records the line filtered through a French translation, an author [Nguyên Ngọc] turns it into Vietnamese, an artist extracts and transforms the anonymous line into an intertextual artwork. Trương Công Tùng’s research material might be better described as ethnographic hearsay rather than standardized fieldwork reports with sources considered official and authoritative. Transmutation and ephemerality ground his practice, a zone of confluence through which images, languages, objects and organisms encounter each other as they undergo corporeal and spiritual renewals.
Excerpt from curatorial essay by Nguyen Hoang Quyen
