Congratulations to the Cuc gallery's artists - Tulip Duong (a.k.a Duong Thuy Lieu) and Truc Nguyen (a.k.a. Nguyen Thanh Truc) for having artworks selected to display at ART SG 2023
In her series The Hybrid 3.0, Tulip Duong combine stone statues with objects to initiate a dialogue embedded in history. The ancient statues of Hindu gods, which have assimilated into indigenous religions of the Cham people in Vietnam, are placed in a fine balance atop a diversity of base formations.
A dialogue thus manifests from this neatly-situated contrast: the elegant curves of Brahma’s three faces against the edges of ragged stone, or the “relic” form of Pavarti’s chests against the modern shape of the motor box.
Within that contrast, the viewers catch a glimpse of multi-linear streams of time overlapping and intersecting, from different cultures trying to cohabitate, from different eras within the course of a nation’s history, from different epochs within the lifespan of an artist.
Time has become Duong’s subject and material, as she gently infuses it into the interstice between objects, allowing their different timelines to converge and collectivize in their story-telling orchestra.
Different from Tulip Duong’s technique of capturing time through found objects, Truc Nguyen paints an abstract realm in his Surface series, a conceptual landscape that is imbued with temporal signifiers.
After applying layers of red ochre acrylic to create a semi-seamless surface, Nguyen molds papier-mache “eyes” using paper powder and glue, puncturing the painting’s façade. Each eye has different shape, size, and depth; some protrude while others recede, rupturing the presumably seamless linearity of time on canvas.
The ochre color, long a symbol of bygones buried beneath the soil, becomes the foundation for a landscape of time, as the eyes signify portals that allow numerous timelines and perspectives to interrupt one another, creating an undulating form-based rhythm.
While Duong’s sculptures effuse the essence of time through implied movements of the sculptor, Nguyen’s paintings showcase the movements of time itself via the presence of papier-mache eyes as temporal simulators.
Time awaits no one, and yet we all try to rein it in vain. The artists in this showcase, however, chose an alternative approach: they allow time-imbued objects and materials to co-exist and tell their stories, separately and simultaneously. And within moments of serendipity, we can catch a fraction of time in their artwork, before it evades us again and dissipates into the void.
