Wake, mayfly…
Kiang Malingue
April 24–June 13, 2026
New York
Trương Công Tùng’s Wake, mayfly… at Kiang Malingue uses a poem by the same title written by the artist as its starting point. Through depictions of crumbling time, a sunken star, waning day, and waxing night, the poem evokes the ephemerality and circulation that underlie the exhibition. Bringing together four ongoing bodies of Trương’s work, from installation and drawings to recent lacquer paintings, the show takes the shape of a hidden garden within the gallery’s Chinatown neighborhood, where the quiet rhythms of the works meet the bustle of urban life.
For Trương, the garden is one of the main conceptual grounds of his practice: a space where care and labor take form, and where organic and inorganic matters, spiritual values, and historical residues float together to create a symbiosis. For Wake, mayfly…, the garden opens with When Nothingness Becomes an Echo of Something and Something is an Echo of Nothing (2025– ), the sound-responsive installation originally commissioned for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo last year. Seven sculptural fragments installed across the gallery are threaded with wooden beads that carry traces of plantation economies and the altered ecology of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, reshaped by modernization and extraction. Activated by hidden motion sensors, each fragment responds to subtle movement with faint buzzing, hissing, and clicking sounds. The viewer’s presence awakens sound and the body folds into the garden’s rhythm.
On a long white wall stretching across the gallery, 120 mylar paintings from A Breath… A Dream… (2021– ), appear in varying sizes, forming a loose constellation of images in lacquer, chalk, and pigment. Breath and dreams—one bodily, and the other psychic—become metaphors for existence in its most fleeting forms. On translucent mylar, images spanning flora, insects, animals, war, and human anatomy drift along the wall as if in a “cosmological timestream.” While the geologic and planetary images in A Breath… A Dream… seem more immediately visible, the two bodies of lacquer paintings ask for a slower gaze. In Vietnamese lacquer on wood, embedded with white eggshells, silver, and gold, In Search of the Present (2025– ) creates a blurred field of images across three panels. What seem like mythic figures, mountainscapes, and whirling winds fill the surfaces, clear enough to perceive, yet too elusive to be named. This delayed visibility emerges through the nature of sơn ta, Vietnamese lacquer resin, in which the processes of layering, drying, and sanding unfold through time, temperature, and humidity.