A circular shape reincarnates and resurfaces throughout The Disoriented Garden video (as well as the whole exhibition). Is it a moon, a sun, a firefly, a spirit, a ghost, a divine, a drop of life, a torchlight? It is all, and it is none of them at the same time. It constantly moves and evades; at times, it multiplies. This evasion is reinforced by the super-imposition aesthetics of the film, reminiscent of Tùng’s layering method in lacquer. An entity devoid of identity emerges in a camouflage shirt, their face covered with long, tangled hair. This human-spirit—or neither of them—takes us through the land, crossing fields of high grass, mountains, woods, and waterfalls. They drift and stumble through day and night. They lie on the ground, sit before a fire pit, and rest on dangling and twisted vines.

As we somehow drunkenly meander in Tùng’s dream-like ‘garden’ film, we hear the sound of the forest—trees rustling, birds chirping, insects creeping, water trickling, flute whistling, indigenous songs echoing. The camouflage-shirted figure lives on witnessing the land and what comes with it—the enduring yet contested cosmology of being. Featured in the film is a 103-year-old village woman, Kpuih Bơr, who is a witness to the histories of the land and a carrier of the local cosmology stories integral to Tùng’s practice. A sense of time and perseverance is greatly felt when Tùng juxtaposes her images with those of an elephant.

Connected from the video installation through slithering water tubes is an installation of gourds in various shapes and sizes ‘growing’ on two manicured plots of land. The state of absence… Voices from outside (2020 - ongoing) consists of natural gourds, found objects in gourd shape, and gourds that Tùng made from ceramic and lacquer. This ensemble of gourd gardens is neatly joined together through vining tubes that feed water and air like streams of blood and oxygen. The gourd garden is breathing and living. Gourd, a common practical vessel for storing water, wine, and crops for the Highlanders, is also considered sacred according to some highland mythologies. Gourd is also commonly used as a resonating chamber of various musical instruments by indigenous communities in Vietnam, Cambodia, across Asia and beyond. Bầu, in Vietnamese, can mean ‘gourd,’ ‘pregnancy,’ ‘bulging plumpness,’ or ‘circular vault.’ Hence, Tùng’s gourds are vessels, wombs, and resonators that nourish life.

In The Disoriented Garden... A Breath of Dream, Tùng chiefly orchestrates a familiar yet, at the same time, unfamiliar experience. Here, the natural and the human-made, the mundane and the otherworldly, the ghostly and the divine, life and art collide. Found objects and newly made works are given the same presence and value, sometimes nearly impossible to differentiate. Tùng’s refusal to fixity and his attentiveness to the agency of materiality make his ‘garden’ profoundly alive. Tùng performs like a conductor of an orchestra of irrigation and cosmology. Whether it is a garden of abandonment, dream, curiosity, and rediscovery, or a garden of all beings—visible or not, audible or not, either water, air, plants, animals, spirits or human—for Tung, this may only be possible to perceive through disorientation. The exhibition proposes an open-ended interpretation of knowledge anchored on the enduring presence of the land.