VSF Texas is pleased to present How we envy the river, its boneless I, a solo exhibition of new works by Vietnamese-American artist, Antonius-Tín Bui. Inspired by poetry, Bui’s intricate hand-cut paper portraits employ beauty to create refuge and liberation for fellow members of marginalized communities. Born in the Bronx, NY and raised in Houston, Texas, the artist is best known for large-scale portraits that revel in the bounty of queer desire and chosen family.
This exhibition highlights a suite of new works created during the artist’s recent residency at Yaddo. Among the most delicate and complex works Bui has created, these portraits illustrate Vietnamese ceramic artifacts found in North American museums breaking apart as they release the spirits of their makers. These portraits suggest hidden histories resurfacing spontaneously and the shattering of containing, limiting structures to create both new, more honest maps of our past and a future defined by autonomy rather than taxonomy and containment.
Bui’s work - regardless of material - springs from a generous well that envisions love, care, community, and pleasure as power more equally and non-violently distributed. Their titles and compositions speak to a spirit of anarcho-romance; suggesting alchemical attributes for the unknown subjects of these dynamite portraits: and you, all future tense, leak through. There is an inevitable quality to the breaking apart of these artifacts-- Everything falls apart, everything that falls apart becomes material for the next thing. Tín-Bui suggests that we bring the wisdom of the past to bear on what we chose to build in the future.
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Antonius-Tín Bui (b. 1992, Bronx, NY, they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work traverses the realms of hand-cut paper, community engagement, performance, and soft sculpture to visualize hybrid identities or histories that confront the unsettling present.
Bui received their BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2016). Bui has had recent solo exhibitions at moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2023); Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA (2020); Laband Art Gallery, LMU, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (2018). Recent group exhibitions include the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC (2023); Artspace, New Haven, CT (2022); Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, CA (2022); the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2022); Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY (2022); USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA (2021); Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX (2020); Blaffer Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2019); and National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (2019).
Public collections include the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; New York Historical Society, New York, NY; BMO Harris Bank Corporate Art Collection, Chicago, IL; Bank of America Art Program, Newark, DE; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Portland, OR; Eaton Workshop, Washington D.C.; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington D.C.; and the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Lancaster, PA. They are a recipient of The Outwin Boochever Prize (2021) and MICA Alumni Grant (2018). Bui is a fellow of the 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship program, and has received additional fellowships from MASS MoCA (forthcoming); James Castle House, Boise, ID (2022); Kimmel Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE (2022); Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA (2019); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2019); The Growlery, San Francisco, CA (2019); and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX (2018). Bui lives and works in New Haven, CT.