Truơng Công Tùng
Trail Dust
Canal Projects, New York

For his recent solo exhibition at Canal Projects, Vietnamese artist Trương Công Tùng created a semi-immersive environment that experimented with alternative forms of land sovereignty and stewardship in all their mysterious material effects. Part of the mystique of “Trail Dust” came from the site-responsive and iterative nature of Tùng’s methodology, responding as he did to the basement of the New York contemporary art center with its humidity and lack of natural light. The environment Tùng built evoked the premodern forests in Vietnam’s Central Highlands through a profusion of spatial arrangements that subjugated perception to a mist of pure affect and atmosphere. The result was an ever-evolving irrigational apparatus The state of absence – voices from outside (2020– ) that never quite settled into its full potentiality until the very last moment.