» The shadow in the garden 2, meditation on similarity, the four seasons and the elements

After cobbling together what has become absent and drifting through nameless lands, the artist needs a quiet place to sit down and reflect. For Cong Tung, that haven is found within his lacquer practice, for that is where one can simultaneously remember and forget, where what is lost and what remains exist in tandem, where abstract space and time collide with the physical resin. He deems lacquer not only as a traditional craft with a history that is tied to the image of Vietnam as a nation. With its laborious repertoire of making the board, carving lines, layering color and resin, only to sand the surface away, the artist consider lacquer painting a philosophical lens through which he views life: the constant shift in visuals on the surface, the movements caught in between layers of lacquer, the memories embedded in its materiality that carry memories, narratives, and space-time spheres – everything can only be seen if we allow our eyes to relax and exempt our mind from conscious concentration.

The artist selects and intertwines a constellation of natural forms, body organs, and abstract flows and strokes that invoke the presence of sublime, even divine, energy. Due to lacquer’s palimpsestic nature, where each concealed layer is partially revealed through the act of sanding, the audience can catch a glimpse of the aforementioned forms buried beneath the painting’s surface; their presence now takes on spectral qualities as they shift in and out of our view. Despite the painting’s seemingly static surface, if we were to unfocus our eyes, we could tune into the slightest tremble from the images beneath: a finger flick, a bony shiver, a wavering grass blade, or a fleeting termite wing. All of them constitute memories of the soil, forest, water, sound, light, and colors of Tung’s absent homeland, compressed into each resin layer. To him, each sanding stroke serves as a violent and self-destructive act, as he chafes away his own memories of the land. But it was also the sanding process that purifies and solidifies these mnemonic forms, allowing them to congeal and form a multilayered visual expression, in which we can observe the overlapping flows of time and the fragmentation of space. And water, ever forgiving and soothing, will wash away the pain of erosion.

(Edited from text excerpts provided by San Art)