Tran Truong

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My work begins with sustained attention to light, color, space, surface, and time. I am interested in how simple forms, repeated marks, familiar objects, and ordinary moments can gain significance through careful looking. Working between abstraction and representation, I use reduction, repetition, stillness, and subtle variation to slow perception. Many of my paintings reveal their distinctions slowly, as subtle changes in color, light, surface, and form emerge through careful looking. The images remain open rather than resolving into a single meaning. The familiar may become strange, while the overlooked can come into focus. I am drawn to quiet work—not because it lacks intensity, but because its intensity develops gradually. Rather than relying on spectacle or fixed narrative, I allow meaning to emerge through duration, repeated looking, changing viewpoints, memory, and personal experience. My work explores the tension between what is visible and what is concealed, and between what an image reveals and withholds. I seek to create spaces for uncertainty, reflection, and alternative ways of seeing. The work may be minimal, but it is not empty; stillness can contain movement, and simplicity can hold complexity. Ultimately, I want viewers to become aware of their own act of looking—to consider not only what they see, but who is looking, from where, and for how long. The work asks viewers to remain present and experience how meaning changes over time.

Artwork