ACROSS THE FOREST
2014 - present
4 channels video installation
Video, color, sound
At that place, the world appears as a series of images which content
cannot be described. Everything are images and every image is
related…to see a person is to comprehend an image of himself – to see a
tree is to see an image of a wandering soul…
Confronting the mighty nature, but not wanting to be swallowed by it,
Truong Cong Tung deliberately spreads many layers of images to filter
out the visual power of the landscape. Avoiding stereotypical depiction
of the exotic aesthetics of this land, Tung uses the moving image as
“performative archiving” – the term that art historian David Teh applies
to artists, filmmakers, and other individuals using the moving image to
archive an entity, yet allowing that entity to vary. The entity moves
away from “stilled materialization” , in other words, it is not objectified
with consistent features to passively remain in the past. Specifically in
this work, through four animate frames, Truong Cong Tung does not
record the plateau territory with a desire to create any historical
records for future nostalgia. His depictions are of fragmented scenes
happening simultaneously in context: the hands gleaning rubber latex;
miscellaneous things like a basin, an iron sheet, a jacket hung on a tree
to scare off birds; family members watching TV, burning fields, digging,
praying, sleeping. These are all incorporated into surrealistic pictures of
nocturnal dreams: lightning flashes, mayflies becoming ghostly bodies
of sparkling lights, or cityscape spectacles. The space is immersed in the
image of unstoppable flying ants and the bizarre sounds of insects,
thunder, howls, and other distorted sounds collected from
documentaries about this area, musical mixes, etc.
All things and happenings are present in calmness as they are inherent
in the lives of people and nature here. At the same time, the ambiguity of
the performative image and sound implies that the state of serenity
becomes uncertain, as if this order could be disrupted.
Across the forest - or the Central Highland’s matter, it is not more real,
nor more tangible than a fleeting dream. It is simply a dream, a dream of
the land, the dream of the water, a dream of the forest, a dream of rain, a
sparow’s dream, an insect’s dream, an ancestor’s dream, a dream of the
spirits. Within the terrain of this landscape, forms pass, images of the
world change, as in a kaleidoscope.
