How does one map the invisible threads that connect human histories to the living earth? What memories whisper through layers of ancient soil? These questions unfold throughout Trương Công Tùng’s enigmatic practice, which oscillates between the poetic and the grotesque, the visceral and the mythological.  

Born in 1986 in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, Tùng is informed by the Indigenous community’s mythological beliefs and material traditions, which have endured despite decades of modernity’s interruptions, from warfare to agro-industrial transformation. Among the installations Tùng presented in multiple cities in 2024, he showed The State of Absence – Voices from Outside (2020– ) in “The Spirits of Maritime Crossing,” a Venice Biennale collateral exhibition organized by the Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation. The installation features dried, lacquered gourds of different sizes and shapes, connected to PVC tubes that pump liquids through its complex system. With trickling liquids and slowly expanding, seemingly chemically induced foam, evokes a microscopic universe that seems fragile yet delicately balanced. The installation was later shown at Bangkok’s Jim Thompson Art Center as part of his August solo exhibition “The disoriented garden . . . A breath of dream.”