The Language of Motion: Anh Trần Returns with a Powerful Second Solo Exhibition

Berlin, with its relentless pulse and ever-shifting cultural canvas, has long been fertile ground for contemporary art. This September, during Berlin Art Week, SOCIÉTÉ steps beyond the confines of the white cube, unveiling Anh Trần’s much-anticipated second solo exhibition at a specially curated off-site location—an apt setting for an artist whose work refuses to sit still.

Trần, a Vietnamese-born painter known for her immersive, gestural abstractions, brings to the fore a body of work that feels less like a collection of paintings and more like a lived experience. These are not passive surfaces. They move, breathe, and speak.

At first glance, Trần’s sweeping canvases might recall the energy of action painting. But her touch is subtler, less concerned with drama, more attuned to nuance. Every brushstroke, every wash of colour is a thread in a broader emotional and conceptual tapestry—woven not just through paint, but through memory, migration, and movement.

What separates this new body of work is its multidisciplinary ambition. Trần traverses three media—monumental canvases, delicate watercolours, and evocative pieces on silk. It’s the latter, in particular, that introduces an arresting dialogue between the contemporary and the traditional. The silk works are not homage; they are transformation. Drawing obliquely from the heritage of Vietnamese silk painting, Trần doesn’t recreate—it’s not nostalgia. It’s reclamation. Her gestures here aren’t ornamental; they’re elemental. They challenge the material, question it, collaborate with it.

This is abstraction, yes—but it’s abstraction with consequence. Her marks are not mere formal explorations. They’re acts of feeling. The body is present in each motion. There's an urgency, a vulnerability, and an intimacy in her work that invites the viewer into a conversation rather than a lecture.

One can’t help but notice how Trần’s pieces behave differently depending on their substrate. The canvas absorbs her energy with weight and resistance. Paper lets it bleed. Silk refracts it—transforming each stroke into something ephemeral, almost ghostly. It’s in this interplay—between material and motion, tradition and transgression—that Trần’s voice is most profound.

In a year where the art world continues to grapple with questions of identity, displacement, and representation, Anh Trần offers an answer that’s refreshingly uninterested in simplification. Her work doesn't seek to explain; it aims to feel. And in doing so, it reminds us that the most powerful expressions are often the ones that resist translation.

The exhibition opens September 2025. It promises not just to be seen—but to be experienced.

—Anh Trần's second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ will debut during Berlin Art Week 2025 at a specially curated off-site location. For more, visit societegallery.com.