Minh Lan Tran: Pierce

Sometimes a bruise is no revelation but uncertainty, manifest. If memory obliges, we follow its soft seam back towards the blunt-force-stamp of its origin. We retrace our steps to reconstruct the forgotten sting, which memory rescues and (almost) pacifies. Or else memory fails, and we are left to inherit the startling, incomplete disclosure that is the closed wound. We search for lost gestures, buried in the bloom. Its chorus of broken vessels searches for us too, as yoked blood utterances inscribe us from within: a torrent, embalmed; a dissolving map. A placeless place cries out and is muted by the seal of its safe deposit beneath. A bruise holds its boundary, even as it blurs.

A cut is different. It does not loom but rips, bursts, surges through. It exhales its discordant genesis. It tears into space and threatens our fidelity to the false belief that it is possible to leave no trace; to keep eternal vigil in the changing face of it all; to do no harm. Under the right conditions, any instrument can be an actant in the story of injury. Which is not to say that all cuts are the same (“any way you slice it”), but once this ambient tension (a promise) is severed, the wound usurps command. Porosity wields complicity like a weapon to which we must yield.

Minh Lan Tran’s “Pierce” reveres the interminable, volatile passage of matter and time, between the fleshly strata of the haptic and the ghostly striations of memory. Here, potent viscosities announce themselves and attenuate as whispers, as veins corroborating unknown sources. Which source and what body? Blushing skeins of blood, oil, milk, bright chlorophyll and amber sap dilate and dilute, wrung through hybrid fascia of latex, linen, onionskin. Staples bifurcate punctured surfaces but do not cauterize the gashes.

Here and elsewhere, pigment cuts its own cord, bloodletting over fibrous channels and grids of charcoal and chalk. Exacting torsions bruise in places to haemorrhage in others.

Where piercing takes hold—by heat or by hand—holes constellate as flightpaths, as fractile-winged incarnations. To pierce is to violate the order of things, and also, to encode it with air and light. To pierce is to bypass tentative looking, keeping watch for threat’s appearance and instead, to risk interference so as to speak and to act. To pierce is to enter, sight unseen, to reach for an inviolable will to transform. Growth itself pierces and clots as lianas—young, stiff, searchers—grasp and ladder older wounds. Grapnel spines pry and graft the splintered evidence of screens, synthesizing fault lines of shadow, crack, and sheen.

Here and everywhere—just beyond—porosity corrupts and redeems.

Text by Julia Michiko Hori