Between Fragmentation and Wholeness: Truong Cong Tung

Galerie Quynh is excited to present Between Fragmentation and Wholeness — an exhibition of new work by Truong Cong Tung. Curated by Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, this is Truong’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and the first comprehensive show of his work in almost a decade.

Between Fragmentation and Wholeness refers to The Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), a book authored by David Bohm, a distinguished physicist in the field of quantum theory. Influential beyond his own discipline, notably in philosophy and art, Bohm was recognized for his application of physics on the rationale of human consciousness and the universe. According to Bohm, the universe has an implicate order in which it enfolds and unfolds to extend into infinite dimensionality. Everything is connected within this unbroken wholeness and any individual element can reveal detailed information about every other element in the universe. Truong’s exhibition is an analogy to Bohm’s concept. It is his consciousness of the wholeness of his inner self and his surroundings that unfolds fragmented elements of the self, family, region, country and extensively the world. Truong makes sense of the nonsense, connecting the non-aligned, and entwines it through time and space to create a nonlinear wholeness.

Between Fragmentation and Wholeness invites viewers to enter Truong Cong Tung’s multidimensional reality through three main axes in the gallery space: vertically — with the ruptures in urban planning and propagated doctrine; horizontally — with mystical human-altered landscapes in agrarian territories; and diagonally — with a mirage of blazing images extracted from the virtual domain. The bodies of works appear in various mediums from collaged sculptures of natural and manmade objects to video installations and layered drawings in light boxes. All contribute to a powerful language of semiotics — of self-indicated signs — which moves beyond the mimesis of nature. Departing from his own personal context of the Central Highlands and Saigon, Vietnam, Truong Cong Tung proposes an understanding of the totality of humanity where our linear modernization unfolds, mimics, adjusts and then disrupts nature — not just the natural world but also the human desire for collectivism and harmony.