it’s always wonderful to see what can happen in a year, and it was almost exactly a year ago that i featured the work of artist Winnie Truong. her most recent body of work Rites of Passage has just opened at Gallery Benoni in Copenhagen, playfully exploring the feeling of age and the precariousness of time.
Rites of Passage explores the transition from youth to oblivion. The subjects in her portraits are poised for no specific occasion, neither celebrating nor lamenting their experience of humanity and death. With the experience of getting older, personality and psyche are in a state of flux, making the feelings of growth and decay simultaneous and ambiguous. The rites of passage then become unclear, leaving mortality to be donned and adorned by these characters merely as ornament.