Legacies (LINK ERROR)
In project “The Sap Still Runs”2019 - ongoing
Mixed media installation
Sculpture, turmeric, soil, water ...
Video:
Legacies, colors, sounds, 9’11, 2019 , 5 Edition + 2 A.P
Truong Cong Tung’s polyphonic and idiosyncratic impulse to reconfigure meaning is seen in many of his video works, the most recent of which is Legacies (2019 ongoing). The footage was shot in the Parisian Garden of Tropical Agronomy, where agricultural experiments were carried out to improve the production of coffee, rubber or cocoa in Overseas France. The garden was also the venue for the 1907 Colonial Exhibition. Although the garden is now desolate with dilapidated buildings and broken sculptures, the colonial exhibition once attracted millions of visitors who came to ogle the pavilions showcasing abundant cultures and products from colonized places like Madagascar, the Congo, Indochina, Sudan or Tunisia. The pastoral landscape of subjection was accentuated with exotic elements like bamboo gardens, bridges called Khmer and Tonkinese, and the then-attractive human zoo, where colonized natives were displayed like ethnological specimens.
In Legacies, the camera traces each hand, each facial feature, each fold in the robes of the garden’s leftover sculptures, closely recording their wind-worn surface. Superimposed over each shot, a ghostly swarm of insects hovers over the stone corpses of now a winged European god, now an Indochinese female, now a headless sculpture of unidentifiable origins. With deliberately jerky camera movements which imitate the constant shifts of flying subjectivities, the artist imagines himself, like Gregor Samsa, transfigured into the insects gathering over these persistent icons of masters and slaves, perhaps celebrating their slow breakdown.
Truong Cong Tung’s finely mischievous gestures urge viewers to give time and meditate on his entwined layers of tales and materialities. For example, the artist collects an unfinished stone figurine, whose outline recalls the iconography of the Mother of the Church; exquisite-corpse-style, he ‘completes’ the sculpture with a startling layer of soil and turmeric, an implant that enlivens the stone body. The presence of evangelical Christianity in the Central Highlands backwoods now wears a look of hybridity, a combination between a vaguely sacred figure and an insert of brown-golden skin, an invented native balm of soil and turmeric roots, embracing her face.
excerpt from curatorial text by Nguyen Hoang Quyen
