INFO
| Name | Anh Trần (she/her) |
| Born | 1989 |
| Country of Birth | Vietnam |
| Place of Residence | Berlin |
| Artform | Visual arts |
| Decades Active | 2010s, 2020s |
ABOUT
Anh Trần is a contemporary abstract painter, currently based in Berlin. Known for her intuitive sense of mark-making, Trần's distinctive style draws from the historically western form of Abstract Expressionism. Her large-scale paintings are immersive in grandeur and feature a number of gestures such as skittery paint brush marks, chalky cloud-like formations, solid blocks of colour, drips and writerly scribbles that resemble their own visual languages.
When she was nineteen, Trần relocated to Aotearoa New Zealand from Bến Tre, Vietnam to study Fine Arts at the Unitec Institute of Technology. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts in 2014, followed by a Master of Fine Arts with first-class honours from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Trần spent a decade living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, studying and working as an artist, before receiving a two-year scholarship to the Rijksakademie International Residency programme in 2020, based in Amsterdam. She is the first person from Aotearoa and the third Vietnamese artist to attend Rijksakademie.
Her paintings have been exhibited widely across Aotearoa and Europe. Most recently she has been included in the group show Aotearoa Contemporary exhibited at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau, and has notably featured in a major biennial exhibition on painting at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium, at the international art fair Art Basel, as well as in the 58th Carnegie International, a highly prestigious triennial held in Pittsburgh, United States of America.
The colours and textures of her canvases are vibrant, but the artist takes care that her paintings are not overwhelming by design – she says “it’s essential that I know when to limit myself and when to go full out.” In her paintings, you can be drawn into vivid, inky oceanic blues, earthen muddy browns, pastel pinks and mesmerising sunset oranges, brush strokes brimming with complexion. She strikes the balance between demure minimalism and sublime invitation by employing underpainted areas of the canvas. Trần uses a variety of mediums to achieve the effect of paintings “that are like letters”, including spray paint, oil and acrylic. She sees painting as a practice that can act as a social conduit for love.
Broadly speaking, Trần is interested in the complexity of translation – and the nuance of dislocated self and context – within her art works. Her works challenge a fixed notion of place or identity. Many of her titles come from English or French, and are sometimes drawn from lines of films such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour. These western languages are not her mother tongue, but speak to the context that she operates in, the education she studied in, the historical form that she is adding layers to, as well as the language of the colonial occupiers of her birth country, Vietnam. In an interview for Art News Aotearoa she comments that “Even though I am not a direct subject of the British coloniser in Aotearoa, I am from a country with a history of colonisation. My interest in hybridity in language and culture arises from my experience of using the English language every day, despite the fact that my mother tongue is Vietnamese. Although I eat Vietnamese food at home, once I am in the studio or gallery space, I follow a set of manners and perform a task of painting as a Pākehā New Zealander.”
Trần has described feeling ‘overwhelmed’ at the way in which her individual identity – as an ‘outsider’ Vietnamese woman operating in a Western context – has demarcated the perception of her painting practice. In an interview for Contemporary Hum, she explains “I don’t make art explicitly about being Vietnamese, or Asian or a woman. All of these aspects of my identity are important…but they shouldn’t be used to reduce my whole practice into a singular outline. I think my paintings should have more depth than that.”
LINKS
Key works / presentations
2024 – Aotearoa Contemporary, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Tāmaki Makaurau
2024 – every water has the right place to be, Art Basel Parcours, Basel
2023 – MCMLXXXIX, Société, Berlin
2023 – Soul Mapping, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
2023 – Fleshing Out The Ghost, Deborah Schamoni, Munich
2023 – Brave New World, Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle
2023 – Some Landscapes, Bortolami, New York2023 – Et puis, un jour, mon amour, tu sors de l’éternité, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris
2022 – 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet?, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg
2022 – The ‘t’ is silent, Painting Biennale, Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, Deurle, curated by Gabi Ngcobo & Oscar Murillo
2022 – Let us run, Plymouth Rock, Zürich2022 – Now that we have settled by the water’s edge, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam
2021 – Open Studios 2021, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam
2019 – And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity., Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau
2019 – The Canals of Mars, Window Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2019 – 136m3, Demo gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2018 – I Understand if You’re Busy, RM Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2017 – Here and Now, Malcolm Smith Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2017 – A trip to the beach, play_station artist-run space, Pōneke
2016 – Painting: A Transitive Space, ST PAUL St Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
Key awards
2020 – 2022 Rijksakademie van Beeldende Residency
