Description

Galerie Quynh is pleased to present Songs of Singularity – an exhibition of new work by Brussels-based artist Trong Gia Nguyen. For his third solo exhibition at the gallery, Nguyen will exhibit four distinct, but connected bodies of work that foreground ideas of conservation, accessibility, reproduction, and attribution of artworks.

The old philosophical experiment query “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” has been transposed in Nguyen’s latest show into something more akin to “does a person truly exist when all material evidence of their existence has vanished?” or, as stated by the artist, “There is a tenuous relationship with the past if no objects survived that past apart from you.”

In 2021, a flood in New York destroyed the majority of the artist’s works and personal archives. Songs of Singularity starts from this ground zero of loss and questions Nguyen’s own basic notion of how we “make things” in order to preserve the personal archive. Rather than trying to close this gap, the artist chose instead to widen it, erasing history versus recovering it.

Source: Galerie Quynh.