BOLZANO.- Museion has joined five partner-institutions in Southeast Asia as part of the selection committee of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant, an initiative launched by the private collector Han Nefkens to increase contemporary artistic production in the video art field.

The committee annually provides a Southeast Asian artist with 15,000 US dollars to fund the production of a new video work, which will be screened at all the participating institutions. In 2024 the winning video The Disoriented Garden… A Breath of Dream by Trương Công Tùng will be screened at Museion -1 and donated to the collection of the museum. As a result of a public-private partnership, this acquisition expands the video art section and enhances the international artistic dialogue with the southeastern territory of Asia, underlining the importance of video storytelling for the collection of Museion.

This year’s winner, Trương Công Tùng, was born in 1986 in Dak Lak and grew up in an ethnic minority on the border between Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. After studying lacquer painting, he developed a style that features a range of media. As the first recipient of the grant, his video The Disoriented Garden… A Breath of Dream is an abstract portrait of the Central Highlands in Vietnam.

The video work is inspired by the idea of an ancient, untamed garden as a fertile ground for co-existing (his)stories, time periods, human and non-human entities, each imprinted in a fictitious space, which is an abstract portrait of the country. Visitors can approach the individual artwork or the overall installation from different perspectives: the anthropological, the poetic, the historic, the ecological and the dreamt one. Spots of light in the video (spirits? Our consciousness? A camera fault?), insects, forest sounds, grass, cascades, animals and plants are all interlocutors in the epic retelling of a land.

The video consists of various scenes that are unrelated to one another in both mood and style, and have no traditional narrative linking them together, apart from being filmed in different parts of the Central Highlands. Nevertheless, by bringing these imagescapes together, the artist succeeds in creating a meditative space — a dream mode — that allows us to navigate and understand the area’s various realities.

In some shots, nature appears as an unspoilt, pre-modern, unclaimed land. Actually, it has endured colonization of many kinds, causing customs, beliefs and its relationship with nature to change. Nowadays the area has become the site for the mass production of commercial wood and agricultural products, with trees deemed sacred by indigenous communities replaced with those that have become a commodity. Its once-luxuriant hills are now covered with manicured coffee and pepper plantations, a story that repeats itself in many parts of the world.

As climate change forces humans and fauna to relocate, the smallest material and intangible things follow. From seedlings to spirituality, they migrate and take root in unfamiliar environments while others inevitably disappear.

Trương Công Tùng (b. 1986, lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) grew up in Dak Lak among various ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands, Vietnam. He graduated from the 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, installation, 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 sciences to produce alternative non-formal knowledge via artistic and cultural activities in various public contexts and places.