Artist stories | LILIANE PHUNG

GALERIE VERMEULEN

How has your work evolved since your participation in the “J'en rêve” exhibition at the Fondation Cartier?



LILIANE PHUNG

The paintings I presented at the Fondation Cartier already addressed the same themes as my recent works.
I was then experimenting with museum formats, superimposing coverings, typographies, fragments of images; everything fitting together like a set of torn posters.
I have always used the same language, regardless of the period. I feel close to artists who tirelessly repeat the same story.

GALERIE VERMEULEN

Your work often questions notions of identity and memory. How does your Franco-Vietnamese cultural heritage inform these reflections?



LILIANE PHUNG

As a mixed-race woman, I appreciate the irony of having peroxide blondes as my muse.

Besides, my parents having separated early, I was not always immersed in Vietnamese culture. Surprisingly, it is today that I feel its heritage, and I discern in my work the echo of a master like Lê Phô: a subtle melancholy, familiar reminiscences...

This new, slightly hybrid style already contained a form of crossbreeding. Like Van Gogh's Japanese paintings, it brings a stylistic vivacity that explains its success, which is still fully recognized today, particularly with the retrospective at the Cernuschi Museum.

GALERIE VERMEULEN

You navigate between different mediums (drawing, painting, installations, etc.).
How do you choose the one that will best express the idea or emotion you want to convey?



LILIANE PHUNG

The conceptual plane of the canvas remains my preferred medium.

This is where I find the intimate ecstasy of the gesture. It's very intuitive and doesn't always go in the initial direction. It's about making an almost ghostly essence tangible... about bringing about an apparition without mediation - spiritual, in constant contact with the surface of the painting.

I mostly use acrylic, which has the texture of American billboards, old hand-painted advertisements, like Bollywood posters... A certain pop texture.

Like platinum blonde, acrylic is a very recent invention.

Liliane Phung, born in 1977, is a Franco-Vietnamese artist who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Spotted in 2005 by the Fondation Cartier, she exhibited her work there in "J'en rêve" (I Dream of It) before joining several public and private collections. Her figurative painting blends artistic references, popular culture, and fragments of visual memory. Her work is regularly presented in France and internationally, in exhibitions devoted to new interpretations of contemporary figuration.