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Tran Luong Considers Vietnam’s Reality Through an Imagined Underwater World

Evacuated from Hanoi as a child, the artist found in ponds and rice paddies an underwater world full of vibrancy and hope.

There is something both unsettling and engaging in the menacing yet naive visual universe of Vietnamese artist Tran Luong. His hallucinatory stratifications of symbologies connect and collapse fluidly across different levels of reality, between the earthly and the celestial, the physical and the fantastical. Perhaps unsurprising, he grew up in a country at war, spending his childhood hiding from bombings, bullets and violence. When we spoke on the occasion of his soon-to-close show “When sky merges with Earth” at Bortolami, Tran recalled how, like many children in the cities of Northern Vietnam, he was evacuated to the countryside during the summer of 1965 to escape American bombing raids. This period of evacuation became a never-ending pilgrimage between various locations, sometimes staying for a full year, other times for only a few months, with brief returns to the city during lulls in the hostilities. At times, he was accompanied by his parents; at other times, he lived alone among farming families.

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Throughout this period, he was often unable to attend school, so he largely studied on his own, receiving additional instruction from his parents and other adults whenever the opportunity arose. Whenever he was able to attend a rural school, it would be only for a few weeks. “Wartime rural classrooms were like semi-underground bunkers, sunk more than a meter into the earth and topped with roofs heavily mounded with soil,” he said; it was an image of destruction and hopelessness that stayed with him. Even during brief returns to the city, the schools remained closed. This period of bombardment lasted seven and a half years, only coming to an end in early 1973. When not in school, he had plenty of time to play in the fields with the local village children and in nature. And despite the hardship and hunger, the natural world, traditional culture and warm-hearted farmers ended up teaching him something new and precious every day and brought him joy. “I spent my days playing in the rice fields and swimming in ponds and lakes; when I had colored paper, I would draw.”

The life teeming beneath the water‘s surface in ponds and lakes fascinated him, offering glimpses of a vibrant reality still extant. “It enriched my existence, and perhaps even shaped the person I would eventually become,” Tran said. “I would sit for hours observing the life of aquatic plants, shrimp, crabs, fish… To my eyes, the aquatic world within ponds, lakes, rice paddies and canals was truly fascinating, intricate and possessed an almost ethereal quality. Many times, bombs and bullets fell above my head. Death was close,” he recalls in the text accompanying the show. “That’s why the underwater world resembles an image of peace, and an imaginary world where I could escape and find salvation.”

He began to build his own imaginative reality; observing and drawing the wildlife of ponds and streams, he found a dimension where beauty and life were still resiliently present, often undisturbed, rich with miracles and harmony, even amid the chaos of human existance. “The water‘s surface reflected the sky, the moon, the stars, and life on land, yet from a completely different perspective,” he writes, evoking those magical moments. “This world seemed to stand in contrast to life above ground, capable of transforming hardship and sorrow into something romantic and luminous.”

Those underwater impressions became deeply ingrained in his art and remain a constant thread in his work to this day. In early works, these underwater creatures, while visually stylized, remained recognizable as real-world aquatic life. Gradually, these forms became more minimalist, their essence integrated into the shared, abstract and fluid ecosystem they inhabited. From this, they progressively evolved into talismanic rhombuses resembling the eyes of a creature that, as a flock, populates, or better, infests, the gallery for this show. He often refers to them as “amoebas,” as they possess this aerodynamic quality.

They are creatures of adaptation and movement; they are meant to assimilate and be assimilated while remaining vigilant. They float on the created linear flow within the composition, suggesting a sense of breaking free, both beyond and within the confines of the canvas. Floating in the camouflage-like patterns of his compositions, they become elements that weave and anchor together the entanglement of everything........

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