Sleeping Angel, small boat, Factory, sunset Liên Hoàng-Xuân

Consisting of painted and gilded woodcuts, this series is inspired by the literary traditions of Romantic poetry, such as Nizami's Majnun and Layla corpus of Arabic and Persian poems, and Hafez's Divan. Liên Hoàng-Xuân was also inspired by the modern elegies of Mahmoud Darwich and Jean Genet.

On these wooden surfaces, the artist engraves her personal symbolic world, combining elements drawn from the traditional iconographic repertoires of South-West Asia and the Arab world, as well as components of an industrial universe. Liên Hoàng-Xuân illustrates a "South of nowhere", landscapes inspired by her experience and memories of Tunisia, Vietnam and Lebanon. All elements of folklore are stripped away, leaving only what these places have in common that is fairly typical and recognizable.

The artist uses the figure of the angel as a metaphor for a wandering, damaged subjectivity. This figure also refers to the artist's biographical elements, his intimate history, which comes to meet other types of narratives such as apocalyptic fictions, grand ideological narratives, the American dream, all set in the geographical spaces of the South.

Through these repetitions, the artist plays with the sentimental and personal destinies of individuals, intertwined with the invisible power of broader historical dynamics that ultimately overtake and destroy them. Liên Hoàng-Xuân places this figure of the beloved, the angel, in tension with a chaos of referents that reflect our subjectivities. In the end, the meaning eludes the spectator through this intermingling of different registers.