Liên Hoàng-Xuân

“My work interrogates elegiac themes (love lament, nostalgia, etc.) through sculpture, painting and video. I use numerous referents from classical lyrical literature, love songs and sugary pop-culture clips, which I combine with superstitious symbols and visual motifs drawn from the great cities I love and where I’ve lived: Saigon, Beirut, Tunis…

This multiplicity of referents invites us to draw a parallel between the chaos of human emotional life and a wandering in an imaginary geography, an affective geography in an area I like to call the ‘South of Nowhere ‘: an immense desert bordered by the great inland sea, where monstrous, dusty and gigantic cities bloom here and there, smelling of roses and iron.”

French-Tunisian artist Liên Hoàng-Xuân was born in Paris in 1995. After two years of literary preparatory classes, she entered the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, then the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts de Beyrouth (ALBA) in 2019, from which she will graduate in 2021. She obtained her DNSAP from the École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux- Arts de Paris in 2022, after training in the studios of Pascale Marthine Tayou and Clément Cogitore. She is also selected for the Mophradat Foundation’s “Fund the art in Beirut” grant as a member of the Beirut-based YBM collective in 2019, and is selected for the Habibi Collective’s Shasha Movies program and the Documed-Tunis, Aflemha-Cairo, Madriff and Filmets-Barcelona festivals for her short film “Last night on earth” in 2021.

Multi-disciplinary, her installations, paintings, prints and videos enable her to blend memories with a loving imagination in a fictional city she calls the “South of Nowhere”: a blend of Tunis, Saigon and Beirut.

In her work, Liên Hoàng-Xuân draws inspiration from these three cities to unfold an elegy full of motor noises, where all kinds of narratives intersect with those of oriental poetry. Her paintings, an alloy of woodcut and gold leaf, are filled with elemental motifs and texts derived from haiku-like messages sent from a distance, and can be read as sentimental trajectories in which cars embody the wanderings of a post-industrial world.

After the exhibitions at Galerie Lalalande, Paris (Leimotiv, July-August 2021 / L’ombre d’un doute, 2022), she takes part in the group shows Maintain at the Beirut Art Center, Beirut (Lebanon) in 2022 and in 2023 she presents her work at Joyridin’ – Humain Autonome at the FRAC Normandie in Caen and 100% at the Grande Halle de La Villette, Paris before taking part in the “À Première vue” event in collaboration with Galerie LOFT.