MINH LAN TRAN
SPINE

In her new commission for the museum’s staircase, Minh Lan Tran (b. 1997, Hong Kong) extends the language of abstract painting into architecture. The work unfolds vertically through the space, like a scroll released from above, taking form as a single 19-metre sheet of natural latex. Suspended within the stairwell, it functions as a translucent membrane—responsive to light, gravity, and movement—through which questions of materiality, energy, and transformation quietly circulate.

 

Latex, drawn from the sap of the rubber tree through a process of incision and chemical suspension, appears here as a material already marked by intervention. The act of extraction—cutting the bark to release a milky fluid—forms the conceptual point of departure for the work, where sap hovers between nourishment and loss. This open surface finds an echo in the surrounding cityscape: the construction site visible from the staircase, where earth is continually displaced for a new theatre, set against the immovable presence of the Palace of Culture and Science. Tran’s work resonates with this terrain of excavation and exposure. Rather than staging excavation through force, it allows light itself—entering through the skylight—to become the agent that penetrates and activates the surface.

 

The choice of latex also gestures toward its historical production in Vietnam under French colonial rule, where rubber plantations operated as sites of intense exploitation and resistance. Onto this surface Tran applies shellac, a resin secreted by lac insects cultivated primarily in India and Thailand and processed through cutting, crushing, washing, and fire. Both materials carry histories of extraction and labour, situating the work within longer trajectories of colonial economies and ecological strain, without collapsing into illustration.

 

Tran’s gestures—tearing, burning, stitching, incising, erasing—hover between damage and repair. Shellac, soil, charcoal, chalk, pigment, and fire are applied not to depict, but to negotiate. Marks accumulate without resolving, holding the surface in a state of suspension between fragility and endurance, opacity and transmission.

 

The work’s surface operates as a plane of exchange: absorbing, storing, and releasing energy within the architectural and social field it occupies. Abstraction here is neither fixed nor autonomous, but durational—shaped by light, movement, and the passing of bodies through space.

 

Aligned precisely with the skylight, the installation opens itself to a vertical axis connecting ground and air. Light passes through its centre and falls onto the floor below, activating the work as both passage and filter. While the staircase implies ascent, Tran counters this upward logic with a gravitational pull. The work responds equally to descending and ascending bodies, to crossings and reversals. It may be read as emergence or return: rising from the ground and sinking back toward it.

 

This dual motion is mirrored in the production process itself. Made in the museum’s basement and installed through an act of lifting, the work traces a trajectory from underground to overground, and finally toward the sky. Painting becomes a conversation with what lies beneath, positioning the artwork as a mediator between earth, body, and light.