Haïku N°24 Liên Hoàng-Xuân

“Dragon Boï
Make love to me
City Boï
Drive further SOUTH
And further SOUTH
Till the gold mine
And further south in my lap is no fruit
Just a bomb in the fog”

This series of painted and gilded woodcuts is inspired by traditional 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.

Liên Hoàng-Xuân takes up war stories, apocalyptic myths and conspiracy theories, accompanying these haikus with their more romantic speech. Through these revivals, 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.

Artist

Liên Hoàng-Xuân, an artist of Vietnamese, Tunisian and French origin, was born in Paris in 1995.

She graduated from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in Beirut in 2019 and from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2022, she was awarded a "Fund the art in Beirut" grant from the Mophradat Foundation as a member of the Beirut-based YBM collective in 2019 and was selected in 2021 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".

Multi-disciplinary, her installations, paintings, engravings and videos enable her to blend memories with a loving imagination within a fictional city, which she calls the "South of Nowhere": an intermingling 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. On these wooden surfaces, the artist engraves her personal symbolic world, combining elements drawn from the traditional iconographic repertoires of Southwest Asia and the Arab world.

Her paintings, an alloy of engraved wood and gold leaf, are filled with elemental motifs and texts taken from messages sent remotely in the form of haiku, and can be read as sentimental trajectories in which the cars embody the wanderings of a post-industrial world.

After solo shows 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 FRAC Normandie, 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.