Drawing from history, literature, and architecture, Thu-Van Tran explores the intersections of different cultures, languages, and identities in her sculptures and two-dimensional artworks. Central to her work is the colonial history of French Indochina, whose legacy continues in Vietnam—Tran's country of birth—and France, where she was raised.
Read MoreRubber is a recurring motif in Thu-Van Tran's artwork, referring to the exploitation of Vietnamese rubber plantation workers amidst Europe's growing demand for latex rubber in the mid-19th century. At Art Basel Unlimited 2019, the artist presented Penetrable: a site-specific work that involved painting the gallery walls with a rubber and chemical pigment mixture, creating a second skin of sorts. Trail Dust (2019)—Tran's first solo show with Almine Rech, Paris—featured bronze rubber tree leaves on the floor.
In her consideration of Western hegemony in history, Thu-Van Tran also addresses the United States military's use of toxic chemicals, such as Agent Orange, that were dropped during the Vietnam War and continue to cause environmental and health problems. For the ongoing large-scale photograph series 'From Green to Orange' (2019), Tran depicts a jungle chemically tinted in red. As a result, the surface of the work varies in colour intensity and hue depending on the viewer's position.
Thu-Van Tran's 2020 solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich was titled H as Homme and expanded her investigation into the history of human warfare and conflicts. The works belonging to the exhibited 'Rainbow Herbicides' series (2020) consist of black-and-white images of a massive cloud evoking a natural disaster or a bomb explosion, over which Tran painted a row of dripping blobs of colours.
Thu-Van Tran's work was included in Viva Arte Viva: the 57th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. She was named one of the '9 Breakout Artists from the Venice Biennale' by VICE for the range of works she showed, which included wall paintings and sculptures of the rubber tree. The silent film projection Overly forced gestures (From harvest to fight) (2017) alluded to the colonial period, focusing on the repetitive gestures of the labourers in a former French rubber plantation.
Thu-Van Tran received a BA from The Glasgow School of Art in 2000 and an MFA from Paris' Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2004. She currently teaches at Paris College of Art.
Thu-Van Tran, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, Switzerland (2020); Trail Dust, Almine Rech, Paris (2019); Une Place au Soleil, Musée du Cristal Saint-Louis, France (2018); Xe Dap Oi, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art, Hanoi (2018); Mountains Are Like The Bones of The Earth. Water Is its Blood, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels (2017); The Blind Excuse, Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris (2017); Listen, The Darkness Deepens, Ladera Oeste, Guadalajara, Mexico (2016).
Summer, Almine Rech, Paris (2020); Ways of Seeing / Artists of the Prix Duchamp, National Museum of Decorative Art, Buenos Aires (2019); Where The Sea Remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2019); Marcel Duchamp Prize, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Manipulate The World, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); A Brief History of The Future, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (2015).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
