Truong Tran

Truong Tran (he/him) is a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist, poet, and educator whose work explores identity, displacement, queerness, and the power of creative resistance. Moving fluidly between poetry, sculpture, and visual art, he uses language and materials to confront systems of power while creating space for reflection and transformation. In this interview, Tran discusses the relationship between writing and artmaking, the unexpected possibilities of protest and queer expression, and his evolving relationship with language, silence, and storytelling

Your poetry is known for spare, fractured language and unconventional punctuation, while your visual work often repurposes found and altered material (like the 9,000 hand-cut butterflies from porn magazines). Do you experience writing and making objects as the same act of "cutting" and reassembling meaning, or do they feel like separate practices that happen to share a maker?

I consider the act of writing and the act of making art to be seamless in that I work with one form until the container of that form fails to hold, leading to a transition into the other. In most cases, I begin with the object. I am thinking with my hands, shaping the world of the art piece as I think through my positions. Usually, something is left unsaid, or still needs to be said, and that is when I transition to writing. Such was the case with my latest book, How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir, which came out this month.

The butterfly piece was a direct, public response to another artist's work you found ethically objectionable. Poetry can protest through metaphor and restraint, but that piece protested through scale and confrontation. How do you decide when a piece needs to whisper (as your poems often do) versus when it needs to overwhelm a room?

I don't really make such decisions. I respond intuitively. The butterflies, cut from gay porn, were a reaction to witnessing an artist use 9,000 butterflies, or more appropriately, the killing of 9,000 butterflies, to make a piece of art. My gut response was, "What a prick. What an asshole." And thus began my cutting of butterflies from gay porn.

What I find interesting is that the act of protest and the accumulation of cut butterflies resulted in a body of work that is, in some ways, a confrontation of whiteness, but also a celebration of queerness. I now have a box of 15,000 butterflies that I use as material. Sometimes I use them to confront. Other times, to reinforce the queerness of my experience.

I don't always make these decisions beforehand. Again, I work intuitively. I don't think the art is complete until the viewer engages with the work and arrives at their own understanding of it.

Your poetry has long engaged questions of displacement and being caught "within the margins" between languages, cultures, and forms. As someone also teaching the next generation of writers, how has your sense of what needs to be said (or left unsaid) about immigrant and queer identity shifted between your early collections and your visual work now?

To be honest, I've moved away from the form of poetry altogether. My latest book began as a collection of essays that eventually became a memoir. I'm trying to move beyond metaphor and poetic expression to simply say what needs to be said. For much of my life, silence was a way of navigating the world, particularly as an immigrant and a queer person. I am no longer interested in allowing silence to do the work of language. I find that prose, the sentence itself, feels much more relevant to my current state of mind.

My next endeavor is to write a novel, which, in my opinion, is the ultimate challenge for someone who is dyslexic, like myself. I have absolutely no clue how I will do this, but I will do it if it's the last thing I do. Because of my dyslexia, I haven't read very many novels. To be quite honest, I've never read a novel from cover to cover. My mind doesn't work that way. It doesn't read linearly, which presents an interesting obstacle for me as a writer.

But I think this might also be to my advantage. I am as much a builder as I am a writer. I've learned that writing a book is different from constructing a book, and my experiences as a visual artist lend themselves to the work of construction. Whether I am making an object or writing a sentence, I am interested in the interaction between the work and the person encountering it. What I choose to say, and what I leave unsaid, creates a space for the reader or viewer to enter and arrive at an understanding of their own.

To explore more of Truong Tran’s work across poetry, visual art, and sculpture, visit www.gnourtnart.com or truongtran.tumblr.com.