Truong Tan paints with egg whites and yolks from eggs on which the audience have marked, breaking the fragile shells to create art but also to remind us of the negative consequences of consumerism that permeate all levels of society, affecting rich and poor alike.

Truong Tan's engagement with performance art goes back to the period of his painting What Do We Want?, featured in the No Country exhibition. A response to cultural conditions in Hanoi during the early 1990s, the painting reflects upon a time when there was as much a sense of an opening of cultural discussion as there were normative hurdles to overcome. As with the artwork, Truong Tan's practice reveals a consciousness of the potential exchange with audience and viewers, his questions and ideas are posed in a direct form, which also characterize his performance style, in which he submits his own body as the site of a continuing dialogue on our understanding of our communities, and the choices made, as well as the ways in which we contribute to such an understanding.

Truong Tan was born in 1963 in Hanoi, Vietnam. He graduated from the Fine Art School Hanoi in 1982, and the University of Fine Art Hanoi in 1989. He served as a lecturer at the latter from 1989 to 1997 before becoming a full-time artist. Following the advent of the Doi Moi (renovation) policy in 1986, which liberalized Vietnam’s market policies, there was a resurgent artistic romanticization of Vietnam’s past. Truong, for his part, abandoned the country’s then-current academicism in favor of a practice focused on the complexities of human psychology and social circumstance. Through painting, drawing, performance, installation, sculpture, and ceramics, Truong challenges social convention and investigates themes of identity and freedom of expression.

Performance: 2:30-3:30pm, Meet the artist reception 3:30-4:30pm

Image: © Truong Tan