Truong Cong Tung

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Shadows in the Garden #2 no. 23

2020

Pencil, tree sap, printing ink, soil, microorganisms on mylar

29.7 x 21 cm

The series Shadows In The Garden #2 lays the beginning of an introductory path that leads towards a blurred realm – one that can be reshaped, erased and destroyed. Like ghosts – haunting and illusory, the work is a place of shelter, a hiding spot, a means to track the traces of impermanence, violence, the memories of an individual, of history, of a shared land.

The shadows here become the material manifestations of memory, the remains of the movement of space and time, the vestige of a life caught between dreaming and staying awake, the ruins of the here and now, and that which goes beyond. Each is a system on its own, containing different images and projections, all linked together to produce the spiritual realities of life.

The visible shadows are drawn, shaped, given life to, while the truth – that is, the invisible – is what we often erase, obscure, deny, forget and walk away from. In the end, it is not important to understand (and even less important to explain) but to join each other in a communal act of seeing. 

Somehow in the invisible, all are related. The (written) words of the shadows… Absent.

(Edited from text excerpts provided by the artist)