Magazyn MSN

Natalia Sielewicz: I wanted to begin by asking about the materials you use. It feels significant that you work with latex and mostly natural pigments: charcoal, chalk, shellac. Could you guide us through the particular language—and the vital materiality—of your practice?

 

Minh Lan Tran: Materiality is very important to me. I don’t use materials that have not already undergone time, transformation, or exposure to their environment. Pigment, for instance, is powdered metal. Ink is water. charcoal is burnt wood. Then come shellac solidified through heat . These materials are all produced through elemental transformations: wood, water, metal, fire. I think of them as living matter. When I use them, I try to respect the life they had before and carry them into another life through the work. For this piece, I started working with latex around a year ago, when we first met. I had been drawn to its translucency for a long time, but also to its history: its relationship to colonization, including in Vietnam, and the fact that it comes from the sap of a tree. Latex is extracted by cutting into the tree and letting out something almost like blood—a kind of white blood. That fascinated me and became the genesis of the work.

 

NS: Could you speak about this need for translucency and layering—not only formally or aesthetically, but also in a broader sense?

 

MLT: I have always searched for translucency in painting: through depth, layering, and thickness. Even when I build layers, they remain translucent. Latex posed a new challenge: how to create depth on an actually translucent surface. This eventually led me to piercing, to the idea of the surface as a threshold—something that gives access rather than simply remaining a flat plane.

 

NS: Your interest in translucency also makes me think of your background in Byzantine art, and your research into miraculous images—images not made by human hands, such as the Veil of Veronica or the Shroud of Turin. Does translucency travel into your abstract work from that field of thought?

 

MLT: There is the physical, visual translucency that I am drawn to, but there is also something else. One of the most interesting questions in painting—and this does have roots in Byzantine art, or in any attempt to represent the divine—is the desire to go beyond the image. Painting produces an image, but ultimately it also wants to move beyond image. I don’t really want to use the word “transcendence” anymore, because I don’t believe in it in the same way. It is more about reaching another level of materiality, reality, or life. For me, translucency carries this idea of going beyond the surface. Piercing, cracking, tearing—these are also forms of translucency.

 

NS: When you speak about working with materials, I wonder whether you are working with them or against them. Materials offer resistance; they push back. In your work,as you say, there is spilling, tearing, scratching, stretching. Watching you work in the museum basement, I was struck by how painting becomes affected by time and by the body. There is an intense alchemy of force and tenderness.

 

 

MLT: Painting is, in a way, a battle with material. When I first entered the museum space, there was this immense void at the center. It was so clean, so ready to receive. The architecture was beautiful—the concrete was perfect—but my first impulse was to disrupt it. That is similar to the first gesture of painting. A blank page cannot really remain blank; it has to be activated. My way of activating a surface is through treatment, care, friction, heat. On the first day, with Ita, who helped me with the installation, we scratched the latex. The scratches are extremely subtle; you can hardly see them. But they created friction, and with friction comes heat. This relates to the way I paint. I don’t think of painting primarily as applying paint to a surface. I think of it more as working with forces. I feel that I am painting with tension. With latex, we knew from the beginning that the material would stretch. That tension became part of the painting.

NS: You have described the work as a membrane, which I find very important: a passage through which light moves, but also a symbolic threshold between different states of matter, or even between life and death. Many of your paintings are stretched, scratched, burned. They seem suspended between solidity and vulnerability, between holding together and falling apart. Looking closely at the piece, one notices black marks made with charcoal—sometimes circular, sometimes vertical. You have referred to these marks as writing. Could you speak about this writing, which seems pre-semiotic? It does not follow a recognizable alphabet, yet it is deeply connected to the body and resists fixed meaning.

 

MLT: Writing, for me, is several things. First, it is a way of activating the surface, of creating heat. It is like the friction of a match that produces fire. Especially because I often write with charcoal, writing becomes a frictional act. I also think of it as calligraphy, even though I don’t practice calligraphy in a traditional sense. Whenever I use writing in my paintings, I think of it as the trace or materialization of an intention—something very direct. Now I relate that even more to the body. The scale is no longer the scale of the hand; it is the scale of the whole body. In a way, I write with my body. This creates a relationship between calligraphy and choreography, which I am still working through.

 

NS: You also have a background in dance, which seems to seep into the work.

 

MLT: Yes. These marks are a junction between thought and the body. I often think about the spine in relation to this. The spine is connected to the brain; it is almost an extension of the brain inside the body. The separation between thought and body is, in some ways, an illusion. Practically, they are completely entangled. You can almost think with your spine. With this work, because of its scale, I had almost no full visibility of it while making it. I was working on both sides, and I developed another kind of vision—an embodied form of thinking through space.

 

NS: The work is distributed through the staircase and holds light differently throughout the day. When you described the monumental empty staircase as a space waiting to receive, we also spoke of Simone Weil’s ideas of gravity and grace. For Weil, grace is not something given automatically; it requires a downward movement, a kind of humility. She also writes about the lever: that in order to ascend, one must first descend. How did you think about ascent, descent, and gravity in relation to this work?

 

MLT:  The space was made to receive. It was a space of potentiality. And I think there is an act of love in creating space for something to exist. For Simone Weil, love has to do with distance: allowing something the space to be. I find that very beautiful. Painting is also about creating space, distancing oneself, and allowing life to intervene—while still maintaining a precise intention. It requires a closeness to the work, but also the ability to let it exist. This relates to Weil’s idea of lowering in order to lift. What I like in her thinking is that grace is never taken for granted. It is not a principle. It is something that might happen if the digging has gone deep enough. Painting is like that too. It involves going very low, into moments that are not glamorous at all. Most of the time, painting is quite ugly. But sometimes, after enough work, something appears that might be related to grace.

 

NS: That seems very connected to loss. You apply materials to the surface, smear them, pull them, stretch them, and things can disappear in an instant. Painting becomes not only an act of layering, but also of losing.

 

MLT: Yes. It is about trying to infuse life into something, which I suppose is what creation means, while also grieving. These are two sides of the same coin. To be ready to love something is also to be ready to lose it. In this work, the ink on the verso cracked because of the tension. I was looking for that. The possibility that the work might dissolve was important to me. It became both an act of creation and an act of dissolution.

 

NS: Everything is water-based, or nearly so, and yet it is held together by shellac—a resin secreted by female insects and solidified through heat. This makes me think again about love, loss, and care. How does one care for a painting while making it? At what point does the painting become something separate from you?

 

MLT: I never really think of the work as mine. It is something I give to the world so that it can have another life. It comes from me very intimately; it is composed by me. But it is not mine. The work is very personal, but it is not about me. For this piece, I was thinking about how to materialize a veil between life and death—a thin passage, a membrane separating the two. I was thinking of Etel Adnan’s *The Veil Between Life and Death*, and also of Mahmoud Darwish, who writes that there is no death, only a changing of worlds. This passage interests me materially. The work became a membrane between two states: a separation, but also a bringing together. Architecturally, it connects ground and sky. It connects people moving around the staircase. It connects life and death, and in that sense it becomes an actor of grieving. There are also discreet white marks at the bottom of the work, direct imprints of my body. I was thinking of anonymous dead bodies, of those who have lost their names. I wanted the work to give life energy, to move toward light, but it is also deeply related to death.

 

NS: I was very moved by what you said about the work coming out of your body while also being depersonalized. It carries the memory of your body and your actions, yet it avoids representational signs of the body or self. It is not a self-portrait. In a culture obsessed with giving testimony to the self, there is something generous in this: the work emerges from the body but becomes an act of service.

 

MLT:  Yes, I think of it that way.

 

NS: Another important aspect is the relation to the square in front of the Palace of Culture. You mentioned watching machines drilling into the ground, and that the sound seemed almost like tearing or wounding.

 

MLT: Yes. We were walking around, and through the large windows I saw the earth being dug up to build a theater. The act felt incredibly violent. The ground was wide open, completely scorched. That informed certain decisions in the work. The Palace of Culture and the historical layers around the building are extremely charged. Working in the basement, I felt that I was receiving information and translating it in some way. Looking back at my notebook, I saw that I had written the phrase “historical marrow.” I called the work *spine*, and marrow is what is inside the bone. There was a kind of channeling of historical layers in the making of the work—a form of grieving that was not about me, but that I felt.

 

NS: When one looks at the monumental staircase and the transformation of the urban landscape outside, there is a promise of new modernity. But such transformation always comes at a cost. Your work seems to honor that loss: the ascent that also demands something from the ground.

 

MLT:  In places that are so historically charged, you can feel things coming from the ground. Especially in cities undergoing rapid modernization, you feel how much is kept beneath the surface. The act of lifting the work from the underground studio into the staircase was also connected to that.

NS: Talk to me about intuition versus intention when creating an abstract piece.

MLT: Intuition is a word I try not to use too much, because it has been overused and emptied of meaning. But what I understand as intuition is related to the senses—not only the senses we can name, but many others we may not have language for. prefer the word intention. In dance or music, improvisation requires intention. It is not simply free flow. There is always a thread guiding it, even if that thread is broad. It might be an idea, an image, a person—anything.

NS: I keep thinking about Simone Weil’s idea of self-erasure—the notion that this gesture is not passive, but deeply conscious. Watching you work, I was struck by the intensity of that consciousness; it almost felt like writing, or inscribing something with great deliberation.

It also reminded me of a work I once shared with you by Meret Oppenheim. In her work Stone Woman, the body appears divided—partly submerged, with the feet in water or mud, while the upper body remains connected to consciousness. There is this compelling tension between grounding and awareness, between being anchored and being elevated. I find this dichotomy fascinating, as if it were precisely what makes action possible.

MLT: Yes, in dance or music, for example, improvisation always requires intention. It can become fluid over time, but it is never entirely without direction. There is always a guiding thread. That intention doesn’t have to be fixed—it can be an idea, an image, a person, a memory—but it holds the work together. As for my own practice, a painting unfolds over a long duration. I work on it continuously, day after day, and each day brings a different layer. In that sense, a painting becomes a sedimentation of multiple moments, multiple realities. What interests me is precisely this layering—being able to return, to rework, to add, to go back in time. It becomes a way of re-threading experiences, and ultimately, a kind of metaphysical process.