Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany
https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/en/exhibitions/truong-cong-tung
Curator: Dr. Corinne Diserens
Assistant Curator: Leona Marie Ahrens
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Trương Công Tùng is the recipient of the research-production-exhibition grant from the Philipp Otto Runge Foundation. The Fellowship has supported Truong’s artistic research in the Central Highlands in Vietnam and the production of artworks in the context of the presentation of a new installation at the Hamburger Kunsthalle from May 2025.
Trương Công Tùng (born 1986) grew up in Dak Lak among various ethnic minority communities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. He graduated from Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts University in 2010, majoring in lacquer painting. With research interests in science, cosmology, philosophy, and the environment, he works with a range of media, including video, sculpture, painting, and found objects, which reflect personal contemplations on the cultural and geopolitical shifts of modernization, as embodied in the morphing ecology, belief, or mythology of a land. He is also a member of Art Labor (founded in 2012), a collective working between visual art and social/life sciences to produce alternative non-formal knowledge via artistic and cultural activities in various public contexts and locales.
The Philipp Otto Runge Foundation is dedicated to the memory of the artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810), a renowned German painter who, together with Caspar David Friedrich, was the leading figure of the Romantic Art movement. The Hamburger Kunsthalle owns Runge’s most important works. Throughout his life, the artist was supported by his brother Johann Daniel Runge (1767–1856), who promoted both his studies and ideas in an extraordinary way.
Continuing this tradition, the Philipp Otto Runge Foundation supports artists—their investigative development and artistic practice as well as their showing at the Hamburger Kunsthalle—through the Philipp Otto Runge Fellowship. The intention of the Fellowship is to enable young artists to present their work to a large audience at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, with funding intended to support exhibitions and/or publications, as well as research, production, transport, and travel. Recent years’ fellows were Susan Philipsz, Dominik Halmer, Manuel Rossner, Vibha Galhotra, and Jenevieve Aken.
Trương Công Tùng’s engagement with nature and his exploration of land and ecological matters resonate with Philipp Otto Runge’s general ideas of the connection of nature and art in a contemporary context.
