Trần Lương is a performance and visual artist, independent curator, and major figure in the development of critical contemporary art in Vietnam. Among the first Vietnamese artists to experiment with performance and video, his artwork is grounded in local experience. Challenging socio-political legacies and policies that repress individual expression, his work offers moving reflections on the impact of ideology on the body, particularly the internalisation of political repression at a young age.
Active in creating opportunities for artists, Trần co-founded the Gang of Five (1983-1996), which organised monthly exhibitions in alternative spaces. In 1998, he co-founded Nhà Sàn Studio, the country’s first artist-led experimental art space, and curated the majority of its exhibitions in the initial four years. He was founding director of the Hanoi Contemporary Art Centre in 2000, a post from which he resigned in 2003 in protest of government corruption. In 2020 he co-founded the Center for Art Patronage and Development (APD), an organisation focusing on artistic development with the orientation of intersecting activities between artistic development and social development. He has continued to direct APD’s programme since its founding. Among his collaborative projects that take art to the people to generate debate about ways of living are the Mạo Khê Coal Mine Art Project, involving workshops with a worker’s community in a rural mine; and On the Banks of the Red River, which presented interactive performance in an impoverished area of Ha Noi.
Trần graduated from the Hanoi University of Fine Arts in 1983 and has participated in exhibitions at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, 2019; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2018; The Factory, Saigon, 2018; Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2016; Guggenheim, New York; Centre of Contemporary Art (CCA), Singapore, 2014; Singapore Art Museum, 2014; and Yokohama Museum of Art & Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, 2013. His work is held in the collections of Singapore Art Museum / National Gallery Singapore; Fukuoka Art Museum; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; Brooklyn Art Museum, New York; Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art – Cornell University, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
