Thu-Van Tran Write As Beasts Scream at Night

Thu-Van Tran was born in 1979 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She lives and works in Paris, France.

A major figure on the French art scene, Thu-Van Tran now enjoys international recognition. In 2017, she gained widespread attention with a remarkable installation at the Venice Biennale. The following year, she was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2022 she completed a major site-specific commission for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. More recently, her work was exhibited at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection. Over the past two decades, she has developed a wide-ranging body of work, whose cosmic dimension is evident in her sculptural installations, monumental frescoes, and film-based narratives.

At the core of her practice lies a sustained exploration of materiality, image, and meaning. Her ongoing series Colours of Grey, begun in 2012, scrutinizes the semiotics and resonances of color. The titular gray is produced through a rigorous process in which the artist uses a variety of pigments, each corresponding to one of the Rainbow Herbicides, tactical-use chemical weapons employed by the American military during the Vietnam War to defoliate and desecrate the landscape. As the bright and distinct tones mix, they form an entirely new palette, a poignant reflection on the aftermath of violence.

Whether through their color, form or innate drama, the milieus in which the artist immerses her audience are invariably built on the basis of a political language whose strength lies in its poetry. As an avid and eclectic reader of Marguerite Duras and Albert Camus as well as Philip Roth and science-fiction authors, as the subjective translator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), as a mystical pilgrim to the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, and as an attentive reader of Vietnamese literature, including poems by Ho Chi Minh and novels by Duong Thu Huong, Thu-Van Tran continues to affirm the transformative and emancipatory power of language. The artist has constructed her sculpted, painted and filmed oeuvre on the framework of texts that she has written or borrowed, transcribed or verbalized, and she admits that “the starting point in [her] work is often a semantic utterance.”

Following a residency at PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art) in 2025, she joined the 2025–2026 cohort of residents at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, where she continues to develop the Colours of Grey series.

Works by Thu-Van Tran currently feature in several local and international public collections, such as the prestigious Collection of the MNAM, Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Pinault Collection, Paris, France; the Collection of Frac-Île de France, Paris, France; the Louvre Abu-Dhabi, UAE; the Collection of the Fondation Kadist, France and US; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, US; the CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques), Paris, France; and the collection of the Beaux Arts de Paris, France.