FEELING HISTORY: The Incorrect Beauty of Linda Sormin and Lien Truong
Linda Sormin and Lien Truong are singular voices in contemporary sculpture and painting. They speak in registers wholly new and counter to the dominant Western canon. Using slippage, lean dissonance, materiality, and feminist philosophical multiplicity, Sormin and Truong wade in knee deep to address formal process and complex cultural histories. With “incorrect” beauty, their open-handed work makes visible plural realities of scope and wonder.
Linda Sormin rolls, pinches, stuffs, and stabs clay into roiling spectacles of gravity-defying gesture and linear cacophony. The work is stop motion catastrophe writ large. Sormin constructs her sculptures using elements from previous work, from shards and broken things found in the studio. Productively stockpiling, even exploiting catastrophe, chaos and unease become sources of her perception.
Though born in Thailand, Sormin was trained in a colonized academic setting steeped in Eurocentric values. She is learned in such modernist Bauhaus traditions as form following function and “healthy volumes full of breath.” But given her Southeast Asian ancestry, her history of immigration, and the recognition that language is fluid, unstable, and fugitive in meaning, Sormin is existentially drawn to the fragmentary and ephemeral. She moves her work forward through gestures of not knowing, getting to higher ground by unraveling logic and the linear.
Mandraguna, 2022, is an audacious chunk of formal urgency. Rolled tubes of clay, like scabrous plumbing pipe, are stacked and coiled into a sort of armature over which Sormin drizzles lacy thickets or conduits of pinched clay. Black glazed configurations dangle precariously. These are fabricated pictograms referring to the Indonesian Batak datu ritual recipes found in the Pustaha divination books germane to Sormin’s ancestral traditions — her grandfather was a shaman. She speaks of “breadcrumbs of language” leading her to her work. The black pictograms are threads, energy-level notations Sormin pulls from history, intuitively stitching the past to the present. Larding mangled snatches of discarded plastic, 3D misprints, into the work, Sormin’s alert eye is grab’n’go, fueled by need’s momentum and untethered from the proprieties of taste. Further questioning ceramic’s hierarchies, a swath of cut, painted, and glazed paper rests atop the work, as if the world of social history, text, and language has floated down, attaching itself in groping phrases to the deeper, shape-shifting
silences of the earthen world.
Lien Truong’s resplendent paintings conjure tales of feminist quest and inquiry. Truong mixes narratives of the Vietnamese diaspora, colonial mythologies, and historical textile designs with an arresting formal inventiveness. Combining a repertoire of techniques and images, she pushes meaning around with the skilled dexterity of a couturier, pinning remnants of ancestral memory to poetic constellations of pictorial space.
Three paintings, The Maiden, The Mother, and The Crone, speak against the brooding trauma and dislocation of Asian females in global misogyny. These works center her mother, her grandmother, and herself. They draw from her ruminations on her familial matriarchs and her lived experience growing up in a war refugee family. Pointing back to both the body and the body-politic, the works interrogate the validation of self against the barriers of conventional expectation and the oppressive canon of beauty. Lush paint handling, tonically dissonant color, and overlaying luminous veils of cut and painted silk layer and collage modes of working that reform the language and claim status outside patriarchal histories of painting. The relevance and richness of Truong works is owed, in part, by her knowledge and assimilation of art history, geopolitics, film, Orientalist ideologies, and textile culture. To the extent crusty conceits of “old- masterdom” give way to knowledge we can feel, Truong’s history is born of fierce
transformation and is deeply immersed in the future.
About the author — Julia Couzens is an artist who writes about contemporary art. She is a contributing writer to squarecylinder.com and The Sacramento Bee. Her essays have appeared in Ceramics: Art and Perception, and for various West Coast institutions including the Crocker Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum, University of LaVerne, and UNLV/Marjorie Barrick Museum.
