Trương Công Tùng | The Disoriented Garden..., A Breath Of Dream...: MUSEION, Bolzano Bozen, Italy

Partner institutions: San Art, Vietnam; Sa Sa Art Projects, Cambodia; Jim Thompson House Museum, Thailand; Busan Museum of Art, South Korea; Prameya Art Foundation, India

Museion has joined five partner-institutions in Southeast Asia as part of the selection committee of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant, an initiative launched by the private collector Han Nefkens to increase contemporary artistic production in the video art field. The committee annually provides a Southeast Asian artist with 15,000 US dollars to fund the production of a new video work, which will be screened at all the participating institutions. In 2024 the winning video The Disoriented Garden… A Breath of Dream by Trương Công Tùng will be screened at Museion -1 and donated to the collection of the museum. As a result of a public-private partnership, this acquisition expands the video art section and enhances the international artistic dialogue with the southeastern territory of Asia, underlining the importance of video storytelling for the collection of Museion. 

This year’s winner, Trương Công Tùng, was born in 1986 in Dak Lak and grew up in an ethnic minority on the border between Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. After studying lacquer painting, he developed a style that features a range of media. As the first recipient of the grant, his video The Disoriented Garden... A Breath of Dream is an abstract portrait of the Central Highlands in Vietnam.

The video work is inspired by the idea of an ancient, untamed garden as a fertile ground for co-existing (his)stories, time periods, human and non-human entities, each imprinted in a fictitious space, which is an abstract portrait of the country. Visitors can approach the individual artwork or the overall installation from different perspectives: the anthropological, the poetic, the historic, the ecological and the dreamt one. Spots of light in the video (spirits? Our consciousness? A camera fault?), insects, forest sounds, grass, cascades, animals and plants are all interlocutors in the epic retelling of a land.

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