NEXT AN4AA TALK - Friday 15 May: AGWA Curator Rachel Cieśla on the Work of Trần Lương
Michelle Antoinette
AN4AA Talks 2026 | Rachel Cieśla | The Paper Is a Person: Dialogue in the Work of Trần Lương
Image: Trần Lương, Love affairs, 1992, gouache and ink on Do Paper. Courtesy the artist.
Description
This talk will be held online as part of the Australasian Network for Asian Art program in 2026 - a link for online access will be provided after registering your attendance
In this talk, Rachel Cieśla will explore the work of Trần Lương through a deceptively simple idea drawn from a recent conversation with the artist: that painting is a form of dialogue. Describing his early works on paper, Trần said, ‘The paper is always like a person. I have to talk with them.’ Not paper as support but paper as interlocutor; not image as imposition but image as exchange.
From this intimate scene of painting as a conversation, Cieśla will trace how this dialogic approach expands across the artist’s three-decade long practice – from delicate paintings on Xuan and Dó paper to socially engaged performances involving communities, participation and encounter – to show how art-making is a constant form of negotiation in which the material, like a person, pushes back, absorbs and exceeds intention.
Set against the shifting cultural, political and economic landscape of postwar Vietnam, the talk will consider how conditions of censorship, displacement and limited artistic infrastructure, have shaped a practice grounded not in control, but in responsiveness. As Trần Lương moved from painting to performance, the ‘Other’ in the dialogue shifted from paper to person. In doing so, he practices a form of art-making where authorship dissolves and responsibility thickens.
Focusing on the exhibition Tầm Tã – Soaked in the Long Rain at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (28 Mar - 16 Aug 2026), this talk will propose that what persists across Trần Lương’s practice is a commitment to relation, attentiveness and the risks of working without mastery. Less a lecture than a proposition to dwell in the space where control is relinquished, The Paper Is a Person will ask what it means to stay open to what the work gives back.
Rachel Ciesla is the Lead Curator for The Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art in Boorloo (Perth). She has curated solo exhibitions and projects by Farah Al Qasimi, Özgür Kar, Ayoung Kim, Daisuke Kosugi, Anna Park, Stanislava Pinchuk, Leyla Stevens, Taring Padi, Hale Tenger, Wong Ping, Kawita Vatanajyankur and Zheng Bo; and published on the work of Salman Toor, Anna Park, Farah Al Qasimi, Jack Ball, Stanislava Pinchuk and Leyla Stevens.
The Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa) is a group of researchers including academics, curators, artists, and postgraduate researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand working in the field of Asian art and visual culture. The Network and its affiliated listserv serve as a platform to share research, promote events, exhibitions and opportunities, foster a scholarly community, cultivate interest, and act as a vehicle for advocacy.