The idea for the project “The Sap Still Flows” originated from the image of a pine tree being cut down in the Cévennes region (France), a situation that Poustochkine happened to see as a coincidence with the series of rubber trees that had fallen in price and were cut down and burned in the Central Highlands, a phenomenon of rotation in Gia Lai that he knew through the practice of collecting and transforming tree carcasses into works by Truong Cong Tung. The vertical forest transformed into trunks lying on the ground, but the sap, carrying the soul, or “soan,” of the tree, still permeated the atmosphere, this time under the guise of creation and installation in the exhibition space, a transit mechanism isolated from the remote mountainous terrain where the two artists first witnessed their own uprooting scene.
“Saigon, trees and ruins” - Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine - 2019 Gouache on paper (folded inside sketchbook) - 32.7 x 14 cm
Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine, comic book artist and Art Labor collaborator, presents a series of gouache sketches and video diaries documenting his intimate memories of the sprawling urban sprawl, sensuous landscapes and anonymous faces he encountered during his many visits to Saigon and Buon Ma Thuot. Poustochkine has been nurturing this series of travelogues during his many years in Vietnam, and most recently, during his residency at Villa Saigon.
Truong Cong Tung, in a metaphysical dream-dialogue with Poustochkine, sends into space a series of installations that use a variety of unfamiliar media, from gently appropriated or archived creatures—a charred tree root, a wooden rosary, a film of flying insects—to ethnographic records of indigenous beliefs in the Central Highlands. Patiently collecting and flexibly tinkering with found materials, the artist confronts extractivism and the fragile reality along the crumbling chain of highland forests, and looks from a more expansive space-time dimension, across the historical veins of (neo-)colonialism in the Vietnamese context.
About Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine
Comic book author Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine has been involved in Vietnam since 2002. After graduating from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg (France), he published a series of comics with the publishers Ego comme x and Futuropolis. In 2011, he was sponsored by the Centre National du Livre to spend a year in Vietnam, a profound experience he translated into the work Notebook/Diary, a narrative that has served as the centerpiece for various projects from comics to installations and videos.
Freddy's comics include Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2017), The Poisonous Hill (2010) and The Apple Corps (2006). He has also collaborated with Vietnamese filmmaker Truong Minh Quy on several films. Exhibitions include Photophobia, a group exhibition of the film works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo and the KCUA Gallery in Kyoto (2013), The Golden Room at the Esperantopolis festival in Ho Chi Minh City (2011), and Spontaneous Generation, a group exhibition at the Angoulême International Comics Festival (2010).
Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine created the work during a two-month creative residency in Ho Chi Minh City, under the Villa Saigon program of the French Institute in Vietnam.
About Truong Cong Tung
Born in 1986, Truong Cong Tung grew up in Dak Lak, among many ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. He graduated from the Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts in 2010, majoring in lacquer painting. With research interests in science, cosmology and philosophy, Truong Cong Tung's multimedia practice, with video, installation, painting and found objects, reflects his personal thoughts and concerns about the cultural and geopolitical shifts of modernization, often hidden in the changes of ecosystems, beliefs or myths of a land. He is also a member of Art Labor (founded in 2012), a collective working between visual arts and social/life sciences to create alternative and informal knowledge through artistic and cultural activities in diverse public and local contexts.
Artwork "Forest Dust" - Truong Cong Tung - 2019 Multimedia installation - Various sizes
Truong Cong Tung has exhibited extensively in Vietnam and internationally as a solo artist and in group exhibitions with Art Labor Collective. Recent exhibitions include Bangkok Biennale (2018), “Between Fragmentation and Wholeness” at Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City (2018), “A Beast, a God, and a Line” at Para Site, Hong Kong (2018), etc.
More information:
- Exhibition opening: 7:00 p.m. on April 24, 2019 and open until May 21, 2019
- Location: Art Floor – Millennium Masteri Building, B6.16 & B6.17, 132 Ben Van Don, Ward 6, District 4, Ho Chi Minh City
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