About

My art practice is born out of my experience as the youngest child in a Vietnamese refugee family. My parents demanded ethics and hard work. They valued independent thinking, leaving us to compose a cloak of deference over a mind grounded in sharp survival. Hours of watching Bob Ross on PBS gave way to childhood escapism, in awe over a magician and his process. My mother, proving that youngest children were not always ignored, announced she had enrolled her 14-year-old daughter in weekly oil painting classes. She gave me fierce, fiery love, an insatiable sweet tooth, and a keen awareness for finding the aesthetic in life. My father was a presence of security and patience. I absorbed his allure for the land, risk taking, history, and the necessity for independence. Both personified an open mind, kindness, and care of others.

As a painter, decades of moving pigment across a support has led to an intimate, tactile relationship with its infinite forms. I move through my painting practice with curiosity and dexterity. The content of each body of work is part of my whole, linked through scale, form and material histories. A shift is occurring. With the passing of my parents, and in this consequential moment; scent and taste bring the comfort of family and sharing in communities. These material and sensory experiences embody a call to celebrate and resist erasure. I stare at the blank page of an urgent love letter, penned on a brink of the natural world.

Lien Truong’s practice examines cultural and material ideologies and notions of heritage. Bringing together painting techniques, military, textile, food and art histories, she creates hybrid forms interrogating the relationship between aesthetics and doctrine and addresses the dynamics of domination, assimilation, and resistance across cultures. Truong often incorporates practices like embroidery and silk painting to dissect social, cultural, and political history, investigating the influences that shape contemporary identity and belief systems.

Truong has exhibited her work widely, in institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery [Washington, DC], Nasher Museum of Art [Durham, NC], Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University [CA], North Carolina Museum of Art [Raleigh, NC], Southern Exposure [San Francisco, CA], Van Every | Smith Galleries [Davidson, NC] Station Museum of Contemporary Art [Houston, TX],  Weatherspoon Art Museum [Greensboro, NC] Cameron Art Museum [Wilmington, NC], the Centres of Contemporary Art in Moscow and Yekaterinburg, Oakland Museum of California, and Pennsylvania Academy of Art [Philadelphia, PA]. Her awards and fellowships include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the Institute of the Arts and Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowships; and residencies at the Oakland Museum of California, Jentel Foundation, and the Marble House Project.

Her work is in several public and notable collections such as the Linda Lee Alter Collection, Philadelphia, PA; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford Univercity, CA; Post Vidai Collection, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Geneva, Switzerland; Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam among others. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Truong immigrated to the US in 1975. She received her MFA from Mills College, Oakland, CA. Truong is based in Chapel Hill where she is also a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.