Lien Truong
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.