Anh Trần

Anh Trần is a painter in spite of the environment around her. Living in Europe has meant a retreat from the painting discourses that permeated her education in Aotea New Zealand. But this only further reinforced her conviction in the medium—or perhaps better put, the performance—of painting. While residing in Amsterdam as a fellow at the Rijksakademie Trần looked mostly at video art and read postcolonial theory. Even if this did not bleed directly into the paintings in any clearly discernible way, it led her to question the notion of a painting as an autonomous object, in particular through the means of its production.

Trần approaches the act of painting as a performative one. To perform painting is to allow into the canvas the vagaries of individual subjectivity and, along with them, the background of the artist that makes the work: their gender, race, class, sexuality, geographic origins, education, etc. Permitted to operate via the means of the painting’s production, these conditions contextualize the painting, rather than overdetermine it as a site of any specific or singular discourse. The resulting work records, and thus is embedded with, the vicissitudes of its maker and the act of being made, rather than seeks to explicate them.

—Alex Bacon

Anh Trần (b. 1989, Bến Tre, Vietnam) lives and works in Berlin. She earned an MFA from the Elam School of Fines Arts, The University of Auckland, and is a former Rijksakademie van Beedlende Kunsten resident, in Amsterdam. Her work has been presented at Galerie Fons Welters (Amsterdam) as a solo exhibition and as part of various group exhibitions at Deborah Schamoni (Munich), Bortolami Gallery (New York); Museum de Fundatie (Zwolle); Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), and Museum Dhondt Dhaenens (Deurle).