HỨA THÁI TRÚC-ANH: Truc-Anh

To create his most recent series of drawings, Truc-Anh applied bleach and other oxidizing agents to paper hand-crafted in Nepal using lokta, a plant that grows only at high-altitude.

The faces that appear in these drawings are cosmic portraits of beings from Truc-Anh’s familial universe. Placed on lightboxes, the discoloured areas of the black paper allow light to filter through as if the surface of the real were slipping away to reveal the fundamental energy of each subject: the images go beyond individual representation to act as embodiments of this vital force. Light here becomes a source of spirituality and the lightbox a door that opens onto the essence of each being.  

By deploying mechanisms of destabilization, in particular by bringing together the material and the immaterial, painting and fiction, Truc-Anh’s works represent a protean world. His work is animated by the question of vision. Whether in the form of the ghosts of his childhood or of shamanic spirits revealed by ayahuasca, at the heart of his oeuvre lies the visible and the invisible, and an attempt to reconcile the two. 

“I want to render visible the forces of creation and destruction that generate that which we call the real,” Truc-Anh writes of his work. “The real and its permanence are merely an illusion. Everything stems from the imagination. Our objects, our cities, our gods, our traditions, our values – all of these things have been created. There is more to be seen in that which we cannot see. It is here, at the borders of the possible, that we must open our eyes.”

Straddling two worlds, that of France where he grew up and that of Vietnam, where he was born and now lives and works, with this new series Truc-Anh embarks upon a process of introspection, a return to primal sources in which light is gradually shed upon the invisible.