Opening Reception: Thursday, September 11, 2025 | 7 – 10 pm
On View: September 11 – October 11, 2025
September 9, 2025 (Berlin, Germany) – SOCIÉTÉ is pleased to present Anh Trần’s second solo exhibition with the gallery every water has the right place to be in from September 11 – October 11, 2025, during Berlin Art Week at an off-site location in Bleibtreustraße 20.
“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 oil-stick “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, 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.”
NOTES TO EDITORS
every water has the right place to be in will be on view at SOCIÉTÉ's off-site location in Bleibtreustraße 20, from September 11 – October 11, 2025.
Address
Off-site location
Bleibtreustraße 20
10623 Berlin
Opening Reception
September 11, 2025 | 7 - 10 PM
About Anh Trần:
Anh Trần (b. 1989, Bến Tre, Vietnam) is based in Berlin. Trần’s painting experimentations consist of immersive representations, operating autobiographically within her own displacements. From her departure to Europe from Vietnam, after a decade spent in New Zealand, she developed abstraction as a response to historical academic restrictions - structured around Socialist Realism - by encompassing bold brushstrokes, expressive colors, layers, impasto, and collage. While living a diasporic experience, her aesthetic language underlines her interest in the linguistic differences between Western and South- Eastern countries’ artistic methods, in their closeness to situated political strategies. She earned an MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, and is a former Rijksakademie van Beedlende Kunsten resident, in Amsterdam. She has had solo shows at Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; and participated in group exhibitions at Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland; Pond Society, Shanghai; Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; Deborah Schamoni, Munich; Bortolami Gallery, New York; Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, Deurle.
About SOCIÉTÉ:
SOCIÉTÉ is a Berlin-based contemporary art gallery with a global reach. The gallery’s bold curatorial approach plays a pivotal role in advancing its artists’ visions, supporting major museum exhibitions, biennials, and acquisitions by leading institutional collections worldwide. Operating in both the primary and secondary markets, SOCIÉTÉ provides curated advisory services to select clients.
Beyond its exhibitions, the gallery’s publishing initiative, EDITION SOCIÉTÉ, collaborates with prominent writers and graphic designers to produce artist books, catalogues, and, more recently, high-end artist editions.
SOCIÉTÉ is an active presence at major international art fairs, including Art Basel, Art Basel Paris, Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze New York, Frieze London, ARCOmadrid, and Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Image Credits:
Anh Trần, As the leaves of the hedge store the light the day thought it had lost, 2025. Acrylic, oil, and flashe on linen. 240 x 183 x 3 cm94 1/2 x 72 x 1 in. Photography by Trevor Good. Courtesy of the artist and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin.