Minh Lan Tran

born 1997 in Hong Kong.

Minh Lan Tran's practice crosses painting, drawing, writing, and the moving image as a sustained exploration of material and affect. She builds surfaces through stratification — layering natural latex, pigment, paper, chalk, ink, and charcoal — inscribed and obscured, built up and scraped away, in continuous negotiation between mark-making and erasure. Her paintings sometimes originate in writing or negotiate language; words appear as visual marks and semantic fragments, or are scraped away, disappearing behind layers of matter. Her work is neither fully legible nor entirely abstract. It questions representation as much as it insists on the embodiment of existence. In this arena, energies and their traces are assembled, gestures executed — the threshold between what is perceived and what is experienced becomes a site where bodies and temporalities converge.

"One of the questions that is deeply rooted in what I do is the relationship between matter and consciousness." – Minh Lan Tran

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group presentations at the Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Balice Hertling, Paris; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; Gallery Common, Tokyo; the Stiftung St. Matthäus, Berlin; Château Lacoste, Aix-en-Provence; High Art, Seoul; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Jan Kaps, Cologne; the Museum of the Home, London; and House, Berlin. In 2026, she was nominated for the Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives and included in Trafiquer l'inconnu at the Reiffers Art Center, Paris, curated by Bernard Blistène, honorary director of the Centre Pompidou.

In autumn 2026, Minh Lan Tran will participate in the 18th Biennale de Lyon, curated by Catherine Nichols.