The Disoriented Garden... A Breath of Dream
Hùng Mạnh Dương
Published by the Jim Thompson Art Center
Bangkok, 2024

The Disoriented Garden... A Breath of Dream attends to the gentle rhythms of the natural world. Published to accompany Trương Công Tùng’s 2024 solo exhibition at the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, the slim volume assembles a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of languages, temporalities, and geographies, collated by artist, writer, and curator Hùng Dương. Written in English and Thai and laced with traces of ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin, the book mirrors the multidisciplinarity of Trương’s practice, which spans videos, installations, found objects, paintings, and drawings. 

Raised amid the verdant landscapes of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, Trương carries this environment into his work, which is steeped in a ritualistic reverence for nature. The exhibition explored the garden as a geopolitical, cultural, and spiritual locus—a teeming site of regeneration and transmutation, mapping the terrain of wishes, dreams, and desires. This sensibility of unruly entanglement is echoed in the book, which shifts between poems, myths, curatorial statements, and photographs, forgoing narrative coherence for an oneiric melange of thoughts and images. 

Readers drift through a perpetual state of slippery dislocation, jumping from enigmatic essay snippets to mystifying prints of Trương’s works, as if moving through overlapping realms of matter and spirit, each brimming with ecological and cosmological depth. Blurred insects rest on a pixelated screen on one page; a magnified horse’s lifeless eye stares out of another. These are drawn from Dance of the insects (2020), a video that conflates human and insect lives in a distorted tableau of moving images, and from The lost landscape (2021), a film installation depicting the glassy gaze of taxidermied animals, an eerie invocation of life beyond death. As Dương aptly writes, the book functions as a “spatio-temporal gap/ A time-traveling portal,” drawing readers ever further into the folds of the disoriented garden and the myriad ways it interacts with the world.

Inspired by literary fragments by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, the symbol of the bracket—“( )”—pervades the text; a vessel embodying the paradox of presence within absence. In its spectral emptiness, the bracket opens space for endlessly generative thought, its ambiguity inviting imaginative meaning-making and speculative world-building. This ghostly omission is rendered tangible through two holes punched directly through the book’s pages, resonating with Trương’s installation Transference (2024– ), which introduced a physical rupture into the exhibition space—a puncture in Trương’s carefully cultivated ecosystem.

While some of the poetry verges on opacity—one page, for example, is dedicated to the phrase “Hey ( ) here ( ) with ( ) out ( )”—The Disoriented Garden... A Breath of Dream ultimately offers readers alternate modes of existence. Shedding an anthropocentric worldview, Hùng urges: “See differently, feel differently, engage differently, and you will understand differently.” The book becomes an ecosystem in its own right, his fractured bricolage of words and images rippling with a vitality defined by eternal metamorphosis.

Aisha Traub Chan is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.