I, Buffalo

Artist Lien Truong American, born Vietnam, 1973

Date2017

MediumAcrylic, silk, fabric paint, antique gold-leaf obi thread, black salt and smoke on linen

Dimensions96 x 72 in. (243.8 x 182.9 cm)

ClassificationsMixed Media

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the William R. Roberson Jr. and Frances M. Roberson Endowed Fund for North Carolina Art

Object number2017.16

On View

Not on view

Label TextIn I, Buffalo, the tactile and unfinished quality of Lien Truong’s canvas gives us a whirling sense of travelling along time and space-- along the Silk Roads of centuries past through to American West, with fluttering cloth surrounded by elegantly colorful plants and distant mountains. Drawing on motifs from The East (as both a concrete location and an abstract fiction), as well as the complex narratives that exist around the textile trade, Truong’s entanglements twist and bend normative understandings of Asia and those historical narratives, offering up alternatives in her finished paintings. With painterly gestures that mimic water or maps, Truong’s work is an enchanting performance, a remembering/reimagining of colonial, transnational, and conflict-riddled histories.
[J. Dasal, 2017]ProvenanceCreated Chapel Hill, NC, 2017; collection of the artist; [LIGHT Art + Design, Chapel Hill]; sold to NCMA, 2017.Published ReferencesNorth Carolina Museum of Art, "The People's Collection," (Raleigh, NC; North Carolina Museum of Art, 2024), illus. (color) 25.Exhibition HistoryChapel Hill, NC, LIGHT Art + Design, “UNC Art Faculty,” August 18–October 7, 2017.

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "The People's Collection, Reimagined," October 7, 2022–May 1, 2023. Object Rights Statement

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