In conversation with TechNoPhobe curator Trong Gia Nguyen, French artist Truc-Anh will discuss in-depth about his installation "The Quantic Family." The talk will be followed by an audience Q & A. The event is free and open to the public.  

For the TechNoPhobe exhibition, Truc-Anh collaborated with Loga3D and RMIT to produce a series of 3D printed mask sculptures, amalgamated from sources as varied as indigenous masks to the Terminator. The sculptures are displayed within the confines of three walls entirely covered in a collision of poster-sized, photocopied portraits taken from the artist’s personal library of visual references for his paintings. These images have been collected obsessively from online sources as well as newspapers, books, and magazines. The installation as a “sculptural collage” reiterates the artist’s fascination with a de-centralized sense of self, one that is no longer fixed to any one location or tradition. Therefore "The Quantic Family" is not interested in technology itself, but how we can use such mediums to de-stabilize traditions and norms. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Truc-Anh (b.1983 in Paris, France) has lived in Ho Chi Minh City since 2011. He received his MFA from La Cambre, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels, Brussels, Belgium. Since 2007 his work has been shown in solo exhibitions in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Vietnam. His work has also been presented at several International fairs and festivals including Art Paris, The Solo Art Project (Basel, Switzerland) and most recently Art Stage Singapore. In 2015, he founded Soul Archive, a limited edition photo project made in collaboration with Rice Creative Agency. He was previously awarded the Prix Manganel (2006, Haute École d’Art et de Design, Lausanne, Switzerland) and Laureate of the Prix Photo Europa, 2009.

Distinctly urban, dynamic and contemplative, Truc-Anh is a Vietnamese-French artist who works in a range of media that includes photography, video, drawing, sculpture and performance. Recently, he has been focusing considerable attention to the medium of painting wishing to challenge our modern condition of passive viewing. Truc-Anh’s paintings are not derivative of everyday reality, but offer the potential to create unexplored, unstable worlds that invite further meditation. His works explore the duality of the image, and the possibilities of belief and contradiction that lie therein. Employing mechanisms of destabilization, more specifically the coupling of the material with the immaterial, of paint and fiction, Truc-Anh presents a fractured world in his work. Drawing upon a range of references from art history to contemporary culture, the presumed direct relationship between the viewer and the work betrays a tenuous hold. (Quynh Pham)