Opening Season 18, Caren Sullivan talks to artist Van Tran on his studio in 2024. Want to know what an artist studio is like? Watch full Instagram interview here.

Van Tran (b. 2000, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a visual artist working between Vietnam and Ireland. His practice centres on traditional Vietnamese lacquer, engaging themes of migration, ecological interdependence, and material memory.

Through layered surfaces incorporating silver leaf, eggshell, and shell fragments, Tran constructs paintings that function as temporal archives. His work reflects lived experience across geographies, drawing parallels between avian migration and diasporic identity.

He has exhibited in Ireland, Vietnam, China, and France, including exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Art (Vietnam) and The Lab Gallery (Dublin).

Artist statement

Painting begins before its physical making. It exists first within memory, material, and inherited knowledge. My practice centers on Vietnamese lacquer, a medium shaped by generations of makers, including my parents, whose thirty-year engagement with lacquer forms the foundation of my relationship to it.

Having grown up between Vietnam and Ireland, I experience identity as something continuously negotiated across distance. Places return altered; memories persist while landscapes shift. Lacquer mirrors this condition. Built through layering, sanding, concealment, and revelation, it records time through accumulation.

Here, Where It Remains examines migration through the parallel movements of diasporic experience and bird migration. Birds appear not as symbols but as bodies guided by instinct, climate, and survival — navigating between departure and return.

The works treat lacquer as a temporal surface where traces emerge and disappear. Silver leaf oxidizes, shells fracture, and pigments darken. These transformations echo how identity forms through erosion and persistence. Migration becomes neither loss nor arrival, but an ongoing state of becoming.

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For more information, follow Van Tran on Instagram @van.trran

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Ultraviolet Art Talks Season 18 EP01 Van Tran