About |
TRUONG TRAN was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1969 and immigrated with his family to the Unites States at the age of five. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1992. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from San Francisco State University in 1995. His career has boasted several exhibitions and showings at art galleries across the Bay area. In addition to crafting visual art, Tran is also a published poet and has received several awards for his work. He teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and Mills College.
HIS WORK teases the lines between genre, materiality and movement, between subject and object. Instead of thinking outside the box, he has rid himself of it. He does not paint, draw or sculpt. His process for creating art is founded in the doing. He finds handed down, discarded and long forgotten objects. Ping-Pong balls. Cutout dolls. Paint chips. Porn. Lab-beakers. Plastic frames and boxes. He stares and waits for these objects to speak to him. He glues things together. Sometimes, dips things in wax. He cuts. He builds. He weaves. And in doing so, he loses himself in the process.
SOME PRINCIPLES inform his art. To Tran, the idea of containment is vital. It embodies the threshold, providing him with a context to work within or around. His art is derived from compulsion. He attributes his art not to any inherent artistic talent but rather to his obsessive-compulsive drive. Tran neurotically searching for, studies and collects materials to find meaning in their existence and creates work that fit into our time and consciousness, reclaiming their lost significance. Truong refers to his work as correlative art. It provides us with an experience, drawing our attention to questions of repetition, surprise, duration and desire. We become engaged participants in his pieces, bringing our own understanding and life metaphors to answer these questions.