Nha San Collective - Heterotopias as Other

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Embracing Michel Foucault’s concept of Heterotopias as sites that mirror, distort and invert other spaces, Lien Truong’s work implicates the labyrinth of our collective history. Through the lens of abstraction, painted gestures adorned with textile designs suggest national identities. The nonverbal aesthetics of textiles transcends language barriers, and potential of cloths’ capacity to be culturally absorbed. This trade once cultivated Western supremacy, assigning the East with exotic mystery, and supplanting it significantly as the Other. In Truong’s paintings’, mimetic movements become phantoms to the chords of colonialism. Gestures envelop, penetrate, and permeate among echoes of water and fluids. The painted forms coalesce into convoluted space, ultimately creating heterotopias bound by visual lyricism.