Blue Memory: Paintings by Tran Trong Vu: An Exhibit Co-Curated by Heather Sealy Lineberry and Nora Taylor, Arizona State University Art Museum, February 7-May 1, 2004

Introductory Comments by Heather Sealy Lineberry and Nora Taylor

For Blue Memory, Vietnam-born artist Tran Trong Vu has installed approximately sixty paintings on plastic in a maze-like format. Most of the figures appear to be generic Asian males wearing white-collared shirts and black ties. Like many of the artist's installations over the past decade, these figures represent anonymity and conformity in an increasingly global world. They also express the difficulties, experienced firsthand by the artist, of being transnational, living in one place and being from another.

The artist paints many of the figures in black and white to resemble a photograph, specifically an identification photograph. Like the photograph, the paint on plastic obscures the "true" identity of the person. In part, these figures are commentaries on the condition of being an expatriate, a migrant or an alien. As an Asian living in France, Vu must deal with the way he is viewed by the French authorities. Immigration officers scrutinize him, sometimes simply because of his appearance.

Vu describes the installation as a play on the ambiguity of memory. He has chosen the theme of memory for intellectual and personal reasons. Having left Vietnam as a young man, his relation to his home country is now in the realm of memory. Vu enhances this memory play by using plastic rendered translucent with heavy coats of glossy paint. His black-and-white figures dissolve in the blue water. Vu describes the blue color as

an active part of a liquid that cleanses, breaks up, deforms, and decomposes the figures. In the blue, the [figures] are depicted in a very different and more abstract manner.... Here one can see the relationship between truth and interpretation, reality and memory, and ultimately, the difficulty of linking with the past.

Born in Hanoi in 1964, Vu studied at the Hanoi University of Fine Arts from 1982 until 1987. In 1989, he was awarded a scholarship to continue his studies at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Vu's distance from his homeland allows for fragmented images to emerge from his memory, like the forceful Communist banners in the streets that have inspired some of his paintings, and it creates an outsider's perspective on the modern "progress" in his country, appearing in his paintings as electronic gadgets and Western toilets. It also enables him to ponder his own identity in relation to the rest of the world. Not quite transparent and all around us, the plastic sheets actively engage the viewer in this question.


Photograph by Daniel Swadener.


Photograph by Daniel Swadener.


Photograph by Daniel Swadener.