Multimedia installation, including: video, sculpture, a joint project between humans, machinery, plants, insects, light, dark, soil, stone, water, rain, and the souls...

Variable dimensions depending on time and space.

Description

Time remains one of Công Tùng’s constant obsessions. He defines it as “formless, a stream of water which contains all of life itself.” In the homonymous moving-image work, the figure of water is present in the waves kissing the shore, or the ebb and flow of tides that follows the lunar cycle. In other scenes, water can be heard through the drippings of rain or the trickling of rivers that carry lost memories of the land. Alternatively, water figures into strings of tears that roll from the eyes of the elephant, or streak down the sun-scorched cheeks of a silver-haired matriarch. For Tùng, water,or time, remains multiform and elusive, escaping any attempt of cohesive understanding.

This temporal contemplation also physically manifests in how Tùng is always occupied with memories–eroded and sunk to the bottom of the river of time–in his works. Born into Gia Lai Province in the Central Highlands, a place that is always caught in the middle of a power struggle between humans and nature, the artist had to witness countless tragedies that accentuate the reality of human fragilities. As a result, during every homecoming trip, Tung always attempts to collect everything within his grasp, from natural mementos such as cicada shells, termite mounds, boulders, and tree stumps, to man-made memorabilia such as silkworm cocoonage, buffalo hide, discarded water pipes, and cheap industrial wood. It is almost as if he was persistently racing against time and its natural decomposition, to salvage whatever fragment is left of his childhood land.

Standing amidst the spirals of absence, the artist cannot help but feel afflicted, confused, and disoriented. In The Disoriented garden… A breath of dream, one will readily notice a disheveled figure whose face is hidden beneath its long, unkempt hair. Its body is clothed in dusty, faded outfits and strapped sandals, completely devoid of any physical characteristics that reveal its gender, ethnicity, or religion. This human figure somewhat resembles demigods, particularly Pan–the goat-horned deity who guards the forests with his melodious reed flute. However, the demigod in Tùng’s video seems to possess no influence over nature: it only drags its feet in solitary, wandering from dense jungles to empty fields, dangling from creeping vines, or hugging its calabash panpipe by the river. The cacophony of a thousand instruments, the sounds of birds chirping and insects trilling, and the crackles of burn dry leaves: all jumble together to produce the beating sound of this demigod’s heart, dubbing each of its movements as it walks, kneels, crawls, and slithers–aligning itself with the land beneath its feet. An exiled demigod, with disoriented footsteps, who holds in its hand no miracle to change its surrounding realities: it can only dream, a dream of corpse candles and spirits whispering names from another past life.

Description is excerpted from the essay by Dương Mạnh Hùng from "The Disoriented Garden…A Breath of Dream" Exhibition Booklet, 2023, p.33.