JANUARY 16 - FEBRUARY 19, 2025

Exhibition Opening with the Artist
Thursday, January, 16th, 5 - 7 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of A Migratory Memory of Flora and Fauna, a solo exhibition of new mixed media paintings of canvas and silk, and a sensory installation by artist Lien Truong in SOCO Annex. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on Thursday, January 16th from 5:00 – 7:00 PM. This will be Truong’s first solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery.

In A Migratory Memory of Flora and Fauna, Truong presents new small and large scale works with hybrid representations of flora and fauna, stating, “Cultural producers have long created works impacting how we define notions of homeland. But what about those for whom displacement severs them from that very ground?” Her incorporation of silk and historic textile designs references the worldwide textile trade, a centuries-old, entangled narrative of colonization, migration, and power that is embedded in her family history. Her father is the 4th generation of an embroidery business in Hanoi, Vietnam. Silk textiles were also once hand painted in Asia, to adorn the bodies in France, Britain, and America. As seen in Enchanting Amulets of Mother’s Milk, oil gestures and silk are adorned with painted and printed botanical textile designs, images of hands and figures, and among water motifs, signifying the merging and dissolving of the painted bodies.

The artist considers her late mother and the passing generation in her family in this body of work, with their love, resilience, and labor enduring through migratory shifts and change. Truong investigates how sensory experiences are connected to memories between generations, and our relationship to the landscapes we call home. In her studio, a growing olfactory lab with bottles of flowers, landscape objects, and leaves seep, creating scent that may incite memories of a homeland across oceans, or diasporic gardens and kitchens unconfined by geographic boundaries.

Centuries of perfume have long derived base notes in their concoctions from animals, whose musk like scent invokes human testosterone. A highly treasured scent came from ambergris, a substance found in the intestine of the sperm whale. Her installation offers small samples of aroma derived from fossilized amber, beeswax and plants, including the cistus plant, whose scent is reminiscent of ambergris. Truong’s touche ou mouillette (scent paper), is in the form of an artist linocut on Japanese mulberry paper. Her rudimentary “bestiary,” a hybrid chimera of sperm whale and cistus leaf. Visitors are invited to mix drops of scent on a print, to tuck into an envelope and take with them as an experiential, parting gift.

In A Migratory Memory of Flora and Fauna Truong binds together personal and material histories of textile and alchemy, invoking ways in which we have adorned our bodies through material harvested from the natural world, summoning our connections to landscape and home.

Lien Truong

Liên Truong’s work blends painting with military, textile, food and art histories to form a diasporic, aesthetic language. Her work has been exhibited widely in venues including the National Portrait Gallery; Nasher Museum of Art; S.E.A. Focus, Singapore; Untitled Art Fair; North Carolina Museum of Art; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. Truong was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award. She has held residencies at the Oakland Museum of California, Jentel Foundation, and the Marble House Project. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Truong immigrated to the US in 1975. She received her MFA from Mills College and is an Associate Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.