The exhibition "The Sap Still Flows" is about to open.

The concept for the project "The Sap Still Flows" originated from the image of felled pine trees in the Cévennes region (France), a situation Poustochkine coincidentally witnessed that resonated with the series of rubber trees being cut down and burned in the Central Highlands due to falling prices, a phenomenon he learned about in Gia Lai through his practice of collecting and transforming tree remains into artworks by Truong Cong Tung. The vertical forest transforms into a trunk lying on the ground, but the sap, carrying the soul, or "soan," of the tree, still permeates the atmosphere, this time under the guise of creation and installation in the exhibition space, a separate mechanism detached from the mountainous terrain where the two artists first witnessed their own uprooting.

Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine, a cartoonist and collaborator with Art Labor, presents a series of pastel sketches and video diaries documenting his intimate memories of sprawling urban landscapes, evocative scenes, and anonymous faces he encountered during numerous visits to Saigon and Buon Ma Thuot. Poustochkine has been nurturing this travelogue series for many years while living in Vietnam, most recently during his residency at Villa Saigon.

In a metaphysical dream dialogue with Poustochkine, Truong Cong Tung sends into space a series of installations using many familiar and unfamiliar mediums, from creatures gently taken over or preserved—a burnt tree root, a wooden rosary, a film clip with fleeting flying insects—to ethnographic records of indigenous beliefs in the Central Highlands. Patiently collecting and flexibly experimenting with the materials found, the artist confronts exploitationism and the fragile reality along the crumbling chain of highland forests, and views from a more expansive spatiotemporal dimension, across the historical (neo)colonial channels within the Vietnamese context.

About Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine

Comic book author Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine has been connected to Vietnam since 2002. After graduating from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg (France), he published a series of comic books 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 his work *Notebook/Diary*, a narrative thread that has played a central role in various projects ranging from comic books to installations and videos.

Freddy's comics include Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2017), The Poison Hill (2010), and The Apple Corpse (2006). He has also collaborated with Vietnamese filmmaker Truong Minh Quy on several films. Exhibitions he has participated in include Photophobia, a group exhibition on the cinematic 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 The Spontaneous Generation, a group exhibition at the Angoulême International Comic Festival (2010).

Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine created this work during a two-month residency in Ho Chi Minh City, as part of the Villa Saigon program of the French Institute in Vietnam.

Regarding Truong Cong Tung

Born in 1986, Truong Cong Tung grew up in Dak Lak, surrounded by ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. He graduated from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 2010, specializing in lacquer painting. With a keen interest in science, cosmology, and philosophy, Truong Cong Tung practices multimedia with video, installations, painting, and found objects, reflecting his personal thoughts and concerns about cultural and geopolitical shifts in the modernization process, often hidden within changes in the ecosystem, beliefs, or mythology of a region. He is also a member of Art Labor (established in 2012), a collective working between visual arts and social/life sciences to create alternative and unconventional knowledge through art-culture activities in diverse public and local contexts.

Truong Cong Tung has exhibited extensively in Vietnam and internationally as a solo artist, as well as participating in group exhibitions with Art Labor Collective. Some recent exhibitions include the 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)...

Additional information:

- Exhibition opening: 7 PM on April 24, 2019 and open until May 21, 2019

- Location: Sàn Art – Millennium Masteri Building, B6.16 & B6.17, 132 Ben Van Don Street, Ward 6, District 4, Ho Chi Minh City

The Phong