Truong Công Tùng

Philipp Otto Runge Fellow 2024

Truong Công Tùng is the recipient of the research-production-exhibition grant from the Philipp Otto Runge Foundation. The Fellowship has supported Truong’s artistic research in the Central Highlands in Vietnam and the production of artworks in the context of the presentation of a new installation at the Hamburger Kunsthalle from May 2025.

Truong Công Tùng (born 1986) grew up in Dak Lak among various ethnic minority communities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. He graduated from Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts University in 2010, majoring in lacquer painting. With research interests in science, cosmology, philosophy, and the environment, he works with a range of media, including video, sculpture, painting, and found objects, which reflect personal contemplations on the cultural and geopolitical shifts of modernization, as embodied in the morphing ecology, belief, or mythology of a land. He is also a member of Art Labor (founded in 2012), a collective working between visual art and social/life sciences to produce alternative non-formal knowledge via artistic and cultural activities in various public contexts and locales.

The Philipp Otto Runge Foundation is dedicated to the memory of the artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810), a renowned German painter who, together with Caspar David Friedrich, was the leading figure of the Romantic Art movement. The Hamburger Kunsthalle owns Runge’s most important works. Throughout his life, the artist was supported by his brother Johann Daniel Runge (1767–1856), who promoted both his studies and ideas in an extraordinary way.

Continuing this tradition, the Philipp Otto Runge Foundation supports artists—their investigative development and artistic practice as well as their showing at the Hamburger Kunsthalle—through the Philipp Otto Runge Fellowship. The intention of the Fellowship is to enable young artists to present their work to a large audience at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, with funding intended to support exhibitions and/or publications, as well as research, production, transport, and travel. Recent years’ fellows were Susan Philipsz, Dominik Halmer, Manuel Rossner, Vibha Galhotra, and Jenevieve Aken.

Truong’s engagement with nature and his exploration of land and ecological matters resonate with Philipp Otto Runge’s general ideas of the connection of nature and art in a contemporary context.

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Truong Công Tùng has exhibited extensively as a solo artist in both Vietnam and abroad and as part of the Art Labor collective. Selected recent exhibitions include Trương Công Tùng: The Disoriented Garden… A Breath of Dream at Sàn Art, Vietnam; Sa Sa Art Projects, Cambodia; Jim Thompson House Museum, Thailand; Busan Museum of Art, South Korea; Prameya Art Foundation, India; and Museion, Italy (2024–25). The Spirits of the Maritime Crossing was shown at Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana, 60th Biennale di Venezia (2024); Is it morning for you yet? at the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2022); and State of Absence… Words out there. A collaborative installation by plants, insects, earth, water, ash, air... and Trương Công Tùng, both held at Manzi Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam (2021). Earlier exhibitions are: The Sap still runs, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City (2019); Bangkok Biennale (2018); Between Fragmentation and Wholeness, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City (2018); A Beast, a God, and a Line at Para Site, Hong Kong (2018) and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2018); Cosmopolis, Collective Intelligence, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs at Para Site, Hong Kong (2017); and Kadist, San Francisco (2016); Across the Forest, an installation for Project Skylines with Flying People 3 at Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi (2016); and Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future at Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (2016).

Curator

• Dr. Corinne Diserens

Assistant Curator

• Leona Marie Ahrens