Tường Danh
Program
2024
Tường Danh embodies living art, advocating for LGBTQ+ equality while drawing inspiration from Vietnamese tradition, spirituality, and religious behavior. Her practice seamlessly weaves together cultural heritage and contemporary activism in a constructed narrative of identity across different mediums.
During her residency at AirHue, our team provided essential support in helping her develop and refine her vision for Cửu Ca.
Cửu Ca is the latest project by Tường Danh, where she delves deeper into Việt Nam's spiritual rituals and practices. Conjuring her own visions of traditional Vietnamese spiritual guardians and materializing them across different localities, Tường Danh is working towards a fantastical installation and performance of a celestial parade. This project is based on her studies of the I Ching, ancient Vietnamese philosophical traditions, Buddhism, the history of Avalokiteśvara, and the worship of Thành Hoàng and Mother Goddesses, spanning from June 2023 to March 2024.
By the end of 2025, after periods of intensive work while in residency at AirHue, Tường Danh had realized the very first works within the framework of Cửu Ca, namely Vị Đồng Âm*, Lân Sư Hồ**, and Nhạc Lễ***.
To acquire the artist’s catalog, please leave us a message here or send us an email via airhue.program.vn@gmail.com.
(*) Vị Đồng Âm, 2024-2025
Bronze, metal frame
2.6 x 1.6 x 0.4 m
(**) Lân Sư Hồ, 2024-2025
Snail shells, seashells, coral fragments, papier mâ-ché, bamboo, wood, iron
2.1 x 2.85 x 1.1 m
(***) Please acquire the catalogue for more information
It is said that we are living in a post-truth era. Setting aside the accuracy assessment of this claim, one could decipher from it a certain sensibility: this world is layered, manifold, complex and yet, hollow and unreal; it leaves no room for faith in universal narratives, or at least, such faith is always certain to be challenged.
Despite all that, our most ancient technology – story telling, that which seems to no longer have a place in this world, lives on without a need for justification. The imaginary and the fictional could move us closer to the real. Some would argue that that is the only path.
Ongoing socio-political phenomena and movements have revealed our increasingly unquenchable thirst for meaning, faith, and truth, from struggles against inequality to ideological and religious conflicts, and the rise of neo-fascism and extreme nationalism. Stories conveyed in any form, be it life history, critical grand narratives, official history, religious mythology, nation founding myth, or folklore encapsulating lived experience, are all constructs for human vitality to dwell on, multiply, and flourish.
No one story is similar to another, of course. Their forms influence the different kinds of vitality they nurture. Some bring peace, while others sow violence. If such cannot be avoided, would it not be better to actively construct and revise our own vision of beauty, goodness, and truth, that which hones as it propels us forward. That is the path Tường Danh has chosen to follow.
The stories and symbols often come to Tường Danh in situations that transcend the limits of a physical body. Dreamlike, impending and surreal. Still, they are woven from the threads of Việt Nam, stemming from particular localities, spiritual and material cultures. Distant yet dear, near yet out of touch. Imploded longing for home.
Emptiness cannot undermine the energy of what is present. Thus, rumor has it that the void is positively charged, it is our desire manufacturing factory – the unconscious. Form is nothingness, nothingness is form.
Through the eyes of Tường Danh, the hollow presence carries weight, inner force, and gentleness – the spirit of Vietnamese folk culture. She is as if in prayer: If this hollow existence leads and compels me to arduously mold and refine, I am willing.
AirHue presents Cửu Ca by Tường Danh.
