TRUC TRUONG
Have a Supreem Day (2024) is a video work by Truc Truong made during a trip to Vietnam that coincided with her grandfather’s funeral. The work weaves together footage of traditional mourning rituals with visuals of fake designer goods, reflecting on Vietnam’s ongoing relationship with global brands, colonisation, and cultural pressure. A rooster, used in a ceremony to guide the spirit of the deceased home, appears throughout the video and becomes a recurring figure linked to memory, and the experience of return. Set to audio recorded during the funeral, the piece moves quickly and visually overlaps moments of grief, reflection, and the influence of consumer culture.
Performance Accompanying Buoyancy​​ (2023)
This performance investigates how memory is transmitted across generations, through gesture, music, humour, and everyday practices. Presented within the exhibition Buoyancy, the work considers how diasporic experience is shaped by both grief and obscurity, using performance to navigate the disorientation of inherited beliefs and fractured cultural codes.
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The central figure, a lion-costumed performer made from shredded, bleach-washed garments, references both transformation and deterioration. It moves hesitantly through the gallery, guided by Vietnamese angels in áo dài and sunglasses, figures who blur the line between sacred and casual, ancestor and pop icon. Their movements reference altar etiquette, funeral rites, and the subtle choreography of intergenerational upkeep.
A cellist plays a slowed, re-composed version of What is Love by Haddaway, once a 1990s dance track, now re-contextualised through memory. The song recalls a story of the artists uncle, newly arrived in Australia, singing the learnt English lyrics with pride. This reinterpretation aligns with theories explored in the Vietnamese diaspora and new wave culture, where pop music is understood as a site of longing, cultural remix, and resistance. Here, nostalgia is not about sentimentality, but about reconstituting identity through fractured but persistent cultural references.
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The work brings together elements of Vietnamese and Christian funerary tradition, family lore, karaoke aesthetics, and gallery conventions. Rather than resolve these contradictions, the performance sits inside them, asking what happens when love, language, faith, and memory are inherited in fragments, and how we make meaning from what remains.
Cakeism (2022) was a one-day participatory performance that transformed a gallery space into a communal site of celebration, chaos, and critique. At its centre stood a towering one-metre-diameter tiered cake, waiting to be decorated, not as a pristine object of display, but as a shared canvas for collective action. Guests were invited to contribute, piping icing and adding their own marks in a space that felt both festive and unpolished.
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The event coincided with the recent death of a figure mourned by many, yet for others, emblematic of the colonial violence carried out under the monarchy’s banner. The performance’s title, Cakeism, playfully riffs on the misattributed phrase, a symbol of elite detachment and class inequality. Here, cake became a material metaphor for both opulence and access, a spectacle and a substance to be torn into and shared.​
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Cakeism was part protest, part party. It played with symbols of empire, spectacle, and class, but grounded them in something generous and edible. In a world where so much is hoarded or hidden behind walls, this was an invitation to make a mess together, and then eat it.