Dao Tung
-
It seems to be
In –– ––, Đào Tùng revisits the memory of texts and publications that once existed in Vietnam’s cultural history – now surviving only as fragments, absences, and faint echoes. Using a vintage typewriter, a symbol instrument of thought and creation, the artist retypes these texts while deliberately removing four specific characters, replacing them with dashes.
Through this act of erasure and substitution, a form of incomplete writing is generated, where language becomes fractured, and memory deliberately obscured. Meaning flickers in and out of view, like a voice interrupted mid-sentence. Alongside the written text, the artist reinterprets several musical compositions found in old publications using the same process: the notes corresponding to the missing letters are replaced by bursts of static and noise.
In –– ––, a space both familiar and distant unfolds, filled with words and meanings yet profoundly solitary. Violently, silence is manifested through sound, and absence through image. Here, reading, listening, and imagining become acts of reconstruction, attempting to retrieve what has been erased, forgotten, or silenced, and to hold it, however briefly, in the present. The work becomes a meditation on collective memory and silence – on the fragile, enduring impulse to create, even when words are taken away.