12 SEP until 11 OCT 2025
Opening – 11 SEP 2025, 6-10 pm

“What have you done to my water?” the Lord asked in a 2013 short story by Joy Williams. “My living water…” “Oh,” the engineers said, “we thought that was just a metaphor,” their pipes defiling the fluid the Lord sipped from his glass.

Literal talk is seldom wise. Don’t figures of speech press with some other kind of weight, double as vessels, a reality lodged within the word? Symbols, it turns out, are not mere abstractions, but structurally, if not sacredly, material bodies that call for concern.

In keeping with a certain legacy of her painting genre, that is what does not happen in Anh Trần’s abstractions. Mercurial, graphic, nervous, generous, her signs do point to something beyond themselves and yet wallow in a physicality hard to translate into a tongue we know. Grounded and ungrounded at once.

We are left to conjure a subterranean dragon ghost on the canvas (Are the clouds in the Oculo like oblivion?), a very cloudy metropolis (It isn’t cold if you have a dream), a diaphanous set of nanobacteria (Tracing all the pain in my heart)—all works from 2025. What lingers is a sense of drifting outlines. And yet none of them hold, as if the familiar were about to take shape, but unwilling to resolve. Watery. Diluted, pale at times, but mainly quicksilver, romantic, lush, slapdash, jagged, feral, decadent, irreducible signs that work as both language and residue—that signify and are.

Closed Place, Open Word (2025) is a landscape of sorts, a triptych. Dried blood-brown fields ooze and crash into jittery dribbles on all panels, while Byzantine blues block the surface in bulky turns. Black strokes sweep across from left to right: one straight, others squiggled. “It used to be the river,” Trần called the horizontal line in an interview. “A mark I’ve been making since I came [from Vietnam] to Europe. Fundamentally, it’s a way for me to pull back from these expressive, chaotic, very busy backgrounds […]. I keep repeating it unconsciously, so it must mean something to me.”

White, ovoid marks scatter like leaves blown across that river while the majority accumulate, skittishly, in dense clusters. The eyes roam with no place to settle. It’s crowded. Yet what unsettles most are the gold oilstick “anh” marks, her name, lowercase, repeated one, two, three, four, five, six times on the blue backgrounds. Each is rubbed, crossed over by a last gold stroke, some almost erased, others still clearly glinting beneath the overruns. Are they regrets? Remedies?

A little emo, a little egotistic, but also lost, venturesome, painful. As if groping for oneself in a forest with no sun. As if lãng du – how Sino-Vietnamese speak of wandering without purpose. We can say “roam about” or “drift” in this part of the world, but lãng du carries undertones of sorrow, solitude, and the prospect of abandoning materialism in flâneuring that our words lack. It speaks of what comes after too many ups and downs, when one carries on through life without a clear direction, to seek insight, heal from a broken heart, or simply experience matters a little differently. So this, rather, seems to be both an Open Place and an Open Word, as aching as both might be.

Trần’s titles are offbeat for abstract paintings, not the copybook Untitled nor a Rothko’s No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow). They are lyrical, romantic, if not saccharine. Typical of the Vietnamese, she tells me, who use sentimentality even when speaking of troubles or horrors, which, like everything concerning affect, must never be addressed directly. An abstraction. And consider that her paintings are large, their scale bold in relation to her body. How much space does one need to touch something that cannot be named, how many routes to circumvent, to lãng du?

There is no abstract painting tradition in Vietnam, and yet Trần’s work makes the genre feel less an imported idiom than a vessel her fellows may find themselves in—even more so, perhaps, in the first silk pieces she has just produced, adapting a century-old Vietnamese (figurative) technique to her poetics. Liquid, unseizable, and yet resolved. As if unaddressable things are granted their oblique, evasive locus, “every water” a “place to be in.” Which doesn’t mean faint-hearted, rather, for some people, possibly “right.”

Isabella Zamboni is an editor at Spike Art Magazine, and a writer. She lives in Berlin.

11 SEP until 1 NOV 2025
Opening –  11 SEP 2025, 6-10 pm

Société and Hauser & Wirth are pleased to present States of Being, a collaborative exhibition opening during Berlin Art Week at Société. Spanning a wide range of artistic practices and periods, States of Being features artists from both galleries’ programs, including Nairy Baghramian, Darren Bader, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Tina Braegger, Trisha Baga, Lee Bul, Petra Cortright, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Salim Green, Camille Henrot, Rashid Johnson, Lee Lozano, Glenn Ligon, Conny Maier, Jeanette Mundt, Wynnie Mynerva, Kaspar Müller, Thomas J Price, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Bunny Rogers, George Rouy, Cindy Sherman, Marianna Simnett, Avery Singer, Timur Si-Qin, Alina Szapocznikow, Anh Trần, and Lu Yang.

Operating along the fluid boundaries of physical, emotional, ecological, and spiritual states of being, the exhibition explores the shared complexities of the human condition through a cross-disciplinary, intergenerational lens. Seminal works from the 1960s and 1970s appear alongside contemporary works, drawing a conceptual through line that resonates with Maggie Nelson’s claim that “there is no single way to be alive. There is only being—again and again, differently.”

Some works gesture toward fleeting, elusive, and metamorphic states through abstraction and material transformation, while others evoke more permanent conditions shaped by legacy, ritual, or historical lineage. Together, these reflections expand beyond an anthropocentric prism to further include meditations on organic, extraterrestrial, and virtual modes of being, employing both biomorphic and synthetic forms to explore how existence is manifested across sentient and insentient life alike.

States of Being places particular emphasis on the performative, aesthetic, and affective strategies through which vulnerability, urges, desires, control, and dominance are expressed. The tender underbelly of the human experience is laid bare in the exhibition—at times whimsically, at times menacingly—through representations of the body and psyche that suggest there is never a singular state of being, but rather an ever-expanding space where values, norms, identity, perception, and imagination converge and clash.