VSF Texas is pleased to present How we envy the river, its boneless I, a solo exhibition of new works by Vietnamese-American artist, Antonius-Tín Bui. Inspired by poetry, Bui’s intricate hand-cut paper portraits employ beauty to create refuge and liberation for fellow members of marginalized communities. Born in the Bronx, NY and raised in Houston, Texas, the artist is best known for large-scale portraits that revel in the bounty of queer desire and chosen family.
This exhibition highlights a suite of new works created during the artist’s recent residency at Yaddo. Among the most delicate and complex works Bui has created, these portraits illustrate Vietnamese ceramic artifacts found in North American museums breaking apart as they release the spirits of their makers. These portraits suggest hidden histories resurfacing spontaneously and the shattering of containing, limiting structures to create both new, more honest maps of our past and a future defined by autonomy rather than taxonomy and containment.
Bui’s work - regardless of material - springs from a generous well that envisions love, care, community, and pleasure as power more equally and non-violently distributed. Their titles and compositions speak to a spirit of anarcho-romance; suggesting alchemical attributes for the unknown subjects of these dynamite portraits: and you, all future tense, leak through. There is an inevitable quality to the breaking apart of these artifacts-- Everything falls apart, everything that falls apart becomes material for the next thing. Tín-Bui suggests that we bring the wisdom of the past to bear on what we chose to build in the future.
June 1 - July 13, 2024, photos by Exhibition Coordinator at VSF Dallas, Michael Curtis Asbill