MINH LAN TRAN Core

Not a conventional exhibition but a single monumental work: a nineteen-meter scroll of natural latex hanging in the museum’s staircase. Minh Lan Tran treats it as a translucent membrane - incised, scorched and coated with shellac - with light from the skylight passing through its center.

Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej on the exhibition:

Minh Lan Tran’s monumental work (born 1997, Hong Kong), created for the Museum’s staircase, expands the language of abstract painting, entering into direct dialogue with architecture. The work unfolds vertically like a scroll, constructed from a single, nineteen-meter sheet of natural latex. Suspended in space, the installation acts as a translucent membrane - susceptible to light, gravity, and movement - through which the artist reflects on the boundary between life and death, materiality and energy.

Latex, obtained from the sap of the rubber tree by incising the bark and chemically stopping the coagulation process, becomes a material with a distinct symbolic charge here. The act of acquiring the material (an intervention into the living tissue of the tree to extract a milky substance) serves as the starting point for the work, evoking an association of sap with bodily fluids. This motif extends into the urban landscape surrounding the Museum, specifically the theater construction site visible from the staircase, where the earth is constantly cut and displaced, and into the monumental, dominating silhouette of the Pałac Kultury i Nauki. Tran’s work responds to this landscape of transformation, evoking a vision of scorched or wounded earth. The wound staged by the artist, however, is not inflicted by a tool or fire, but by light, piercing the surface through the museum’s skylight.

The choice of latex also refers to the history of its production in Vietnam under French colonial rule, where rubber plantations functioned as sites of extreme exploitation. This material simultaneously became a key export commodity and a catalyst for labor unrest that initiated anti-colonial resistance movements. Onto this surface, Tran applies shellac - a resin secreted by female lac insects, an insect cultivated mainly in India and Thailand - obtained by cutting branches, crushing, rinsing, and heating over an open flame.

These materials, shaped by processes of extraction, labor, and transformation, place Minh Lan Tran’s work within a broader context of colonial violence and ecological exploitation. The artist’s painterly gestures, such as tearing, scorching, stitching, incising, and erasing - akin to leaving inscriptions and repairing - thus remain suspended between care and violence. Using shellac, earth, fire, charcoal, chalk, and pigment, the artist treats the surface as a field of abstract negotiation, not representation. Stains and marks accumulate in a state of tension, pulsating between fragility and resilience, opacity and permeability.

The translucency of latex evokes both the concept of a membrane and plasma. Here, the membrane acts as a threshold - a thin layer that simultaneously separates and enables the transmission of energy and light. Plasma, understood both as the colorless, fluid part of blood and as the fourth state of matter in physics, refers to a highly conductive, ionized medium in which energy circulates. Tran conceives the work’s surface as precisely such a plane of exchange: capable of absorbing, releasing, and regenerating energy within the architectural and social field it co-creates.

In this sense, abstraction acquires an embodied and temporal character, shaped by movement, light, and time. Evoking the motif of a veil between life and death, the work refers to Buddhist concepts of materiality and impermanence, resonating with the words of Mahmoud Darwish, inspired by Chief Seattle’s statement: ‘There is no death, only a change of worlds.’ The vertical orientation of the installation connects what is above and below - the earth and the skylight - two poles of architecture. The precise positioning of the work relative to the skylight allows light to penetrate its center and fall towards the floor, activating the surface simultaneously as a passage and a filter.

What to expect

The whole show is one work, made specifically for the museum’s staircase: a single nineteen-meter sheet of natural latex unrolled vertically like a scroll. The material is translucent and responds to light, gravity and movement, and the artist has worked it with shellac, earth, charcoal, chalk and pigment - you can see traces of tearing, scorching, stitching and incising.

The materials carry their own histories: latex points back to the rubber plantations of Vietnam under French colonial rule, while shellac is a resin harvested from insects farmed mainly in India and Thailand. The work hangs directly under the museum’s skylight, so light passes through its center and falls to the floor. From the staircase you can also see the theater construction site and the Palace of Culture, both of which the artist folds into the installation’s context.

Tickets, opening hours, and current details are on the Museum of Modern Art website.

Museum profile: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej.