After Jihyun Yun’s “War Soup” and a recipe for sponge cake, a poem for Lien Truong’s cake paintings
***
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, butter and line the base of two cake tins with baking parchment.
The artist turns the dial, worn with use so jams at 300.
Hands drag fat across cold metal, translucence crunch over the top.
Using a whisk, beat the butter and sugar together, the two strangers an unlikely meeting of grainy mass. Keep whisking until the frenzy of arm against saccharine lumps blur infrared, deep yellow flashing lightning to turn pale.
I remember thirsting for sweet
Clear juice boils to turn crystallic
Prising open grandma’s teeth
to find mealy mung beans mashed with a half nail of
Extreme Refinement
I poke my head into her cavemouth
and beg her to spit back out the specks
of sweetsalt I grow up to never eat.
Eggs spill their gelatine over butter
to add desirable fluff and shine. The whisk’s balloon drags bloodclouds into the fold that bloodrain into the sea. Above us there seems only sky / and cloud seeding; what is sacred must also weep.
Sometimes I see only inversion
sky and land / myths told by shadow
Devils dance with the deceased
Or no, just women, ruling darkness
Whisk again, half bag of flour. The other half ration for later.
With outstretched arms, tip your bowl into your tins, and watch the ribbons of batter submit to roundness. Bake in the centre of the oven to
reach for the promise
of cake.
Thái Hà is a curator, writer and translator based in HCMC, Vietnam. Her work explores speculative world-building and post-apocalypse aesthetics to imagine what emerges from colonial and capitalist ruins. Her curatorial projects, writings and translations have been presented and featured in various museums, cultural institutions, and biennales, such as the Tate St Ives, Barbican Centre, Carnegie International, Asian Art Biennial, TDX Ice Factory, and Sàn Art, among others. Hà was selected as a resident at Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto and for the 12th Berlin Biennale Curator’s Workshop. She is currently Curator at Nguyễn Art Foundation.
Lien Truong is an artist whose practice blends painting with military, textile, food and art histories to form a diasporic, aesthetic language. Her work has been exhibited widely in venues including the National Portrait Gallery; Nasher Museum of Art; S.E.A. Focus, Singapore; Untitled Art Fair; North Carolina Museum of Art; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. Truong was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award in 2019. She has held residencies at the Oakland Museum of California, Jentel Foundation, and the Marble House Project. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Trương immigrated to the US in 1975. She received her MFA from Mills College and is an Associate Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
