Trương Công Tùng’s works desist from transparent finality. His diverse body of mixed-media works – moving images, installations, and lacquer paintings – cultivates nonlinear narratives across different sites. This forms a synergic ecosystem that can be activated against the monotonous view of history, as he contemplates the atmosphere enshrouding a speck of soil or peers into the interstices of pixels. His aesthetic is one of superimposition and dissolution, hinged upon the metaphorical tendon that links fragmented layers of memories of a landscape, a person, an object. Trương’s installation at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo marks a pivotal moment where his material-based practice incorporates sonic elements. In an ethereal landscape made of wooden beehives salvaged from bee farms across the artist’s hometown in Central Highlands, Vietnam, Trương embeds sensors into objects – a hybrid between organic materials and technological gadgets. Scattered on the ground are also found and repurposed objects from the Highlands: lacquered vessels, ocher-toned textile dyed with red basanite soil, musical instruments fashioned from calabash, and a termite mound covered in gold.

As audiences walk around in Trương’s locus amoenus, observing his cornucopia of foraged items, open your ears and allow them to take in a spectral orchestra. Any flicking sounds of an invisible tongue? A chortle of unknown birds? The drops of rainwater? Or perhaps the whispers of mountainous spirits. Drawing inspirations from Indigenous folklore in Central Highlands, where jungle explorers might be enchanted and led astray by the sound of non-human entities, the artist simulates folk wisdom through sensorial engagement: as audiences move, the sensors detect their presence and emit sound in response. Positioning the act of listening as a connective medium on par with seeing, the installation plays with the concept of a chance encounter, where sounds not only invoke the elusive presence of phantasmal beings but also trigger our primordial imagination. Trương’s work thus questions humanity’s current fixation on visuals as a method of world perception and retunes our subconscious to the spontaneous yet tantalizing presence of sounds.