Lien Truong

Lien Truong (b. 1986, Hanoi) trained at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts before a residency in Kyoto reshaped her practice entirely. There she stopped painting under studio lamps and began working only in the last ninety minutes of natural light — a constraint she has kept for over a decade. Each canvas is built from dozens of translucent oil layers, each laid down at dusk and left to dry for days, so that the finished surface carries time the way sediment carries a river.

Her early work held on to the outlines of rooms — windows, chairs, the geometry of domestic space. The paintings since 2022 let those outlines go. What remains is weight: tonal fields of warm grey that separate, up close, into dozens of evening colours that never quite resolve. Critics have placed her among a generation of Southeast Asian painters returning to slowness as a deliberate position.

Practice

Truong works on Belgian linen primed with rabbit-skin glue, in a palette she mixes once a season and never corrects mid-painting. A single canvas can take four months of dusk sittings. She destroys roughly half of what she makes — the gallery holds a register of every surviving work.

“I paint the hour just before dusk — when objects give up their outlines and keep only their weight.”

Recognition

Her paintings are held in private collections across Asia and Europe, and her 2026 solo exhibition with NOEMA marks the close of the dusk cycle that defined her international reputation. The gallery has represented Truong exclusively since 2019.