A San Francisco artist found light during lockdown. Now he's sharing that glow
Artist Truong Tran at the Kearny Street Workshop gallery displaying his solo exhibition of "100 Nights Of the Pandemic/100 Day Of Yearning." (Giselle Garza Lerma/S.F. Chronicle)
Truong Tran rummaged around in the dark of his apartment in San Francisco. He tinkered, fiddled and wired until a form took shape - the width of a melon and glowing like a tiny moon - in his hands.
Tran made 95 light sculptures like it over the course of 100 days during COVID-19 quarantine. For years, though, Tran refused to show them to the public, despite requests. At the time, he felt it was too soon.
"I always said, ‘No,' because it didn't feel right to look at this work without distance," he said. "I felt like we needed to look back."
Today, dozens of Tran's light sculptures are on display at Kearny Street Workshop in "100 Nights of Pandemic/100 Days of Yearning," a solo exhibition on view through Saturday, Feb. 21.
"100 Nights Of the Pandemic/100 Day Of Yearning" (Giselle Garza Lerma/S.F. Chronicle)
A poet and visual artist, Tran immigrated with his family to the Bay Area in 1975 at the age of 5, after living in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Kansas. Now 56, he works at Northeastern University's Oakland campus and has lived at his apartment in Haight-Ashbury for more than 20 years. There, he assembled the light fixtures from the trove of found objects he's collected from places like Goodwill and Building Resources, a nonprofit corporation that sells low-cost recycled building and landscaping materials. Each creation mostly began in the dark, Tran said, and ended when he finally illuminated his isolation with a new source of light.
"100 Nights Of the Pandemic/100 Day Of Yearning" (Giselle Garza Lerma/S.F. Chronicle)
"It became a meditation of sorts," he said.
The exhibition also includes a series of mostly wooden landscapes inspired by the fictional Neverland from the classic Peter Pan tale. Those works were constructed in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election. Tran sees them as allegories for a more hopeful future beyond the present political reality, rooted in the dream-like wonder of his childhood.
But the highlight of the show is a lattice cubby displaying 25 of Tran's light sculptures in a five-by-five grid, one brightening each nook. It's a stunning composite that reinforces the tactility and continuity of Tran's work, though each form is unique.
Some dangle with glass baubles or woolen orbs, another is boxy and tied with a striped ribbon like a semi-translucent Pannetone. One on an adjacent bench is conical and almost regal in its silhouette, reminding Tran of Lady Macbeth. Another is pinned with butterflies cut by hand from images of naked men, a dig at British artist Damien Hirst, who used thousands of dead and live butterflies in his work.
"I just couldn't get past that idea of human cruelty," Tran said.
"100 Nights Of the Pandemic/100 Day Of Yearning" (Giselle Garza Lerma/S.F. Chronicle)
Then there are sculptures that break from the abundance of orb-forward lamps so sharply that they are mystifying, if not amusing. One features a handful of marbles in a glass box, an homage to Tran's childhood when his immigrant parents could afford the most basic of toys for him and his siblings. Atop the marbles is a real honeycrisp apple purchased from Gus's on Haight Street.
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"100 Nights of Pandemic/100 Days of Yearning": Sculpture. 1-6 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday; noon-3 p.m. Saturday. Through Saturday, Feb. 21. Free. ARC Gallery & Studios, 1246 Folsom St., S.F. www.kearnystreet.org
"We'll see what happens in a month," Tran shrugged.
Central to Tran's life and work is his teaching, as an associate teaching professor in writing and a professor in far Eastern studies, where he extends to his students the same freedom and whimsy he grants himself.
"I want to convince them that they have permission to let their intuition prevail in the act of creating," he said.
In January, Tran was framed in the rectangle of his virtual undergraduate creative writing foundations class, as most of his students are in Boston at Northeastern's main campus. After hands hesitantly raised and disappeared,cameras anxiously flickering off and on, Tran's warm, persistent encouragement managed to get a few students to read their sonnets aloud.
They wrote about the end of the world, about gun violence, about being away from their home countries and about the end of childhood. But Tran also found something hopeful about their insights.
"These students, and all that they're grappling with and all that they're trying to move through the world with, is remarkable," he said. "I think we're going to be OK."
Artist, Truong Tran, poses for a portrait inside Kearny Street Workshop gallery displaying his solo exhibition of "100 Nights Of the Pandemic/100 Day Of yearning," in San Francisco on Jan. 22, 2025. (Giselle Garza Lerma/S.F. Chronicle)
His classes have been transformative spaces for students like Mimi Tempestt, who met Tran while pursuing her masters at Mills College in 2018. Tempestt was immediately struck by how invested Tran was in his students and how clearly he saw them.
"He's like a monk," Tempestt said. "He doesn't flaunt his knowledge and his wisdom, but it's so there."
Tempestt remembered a particular time when Tran, while workshopping one student's work, pointedly but non-judgementally asked if that student had thought about how he portrayed women in his poetry. This incited a vibrant class discussion about each of their blindspots.
"It was one of the moments where I realized he was paying attention to us and our work - in ways that weren't just in the classroom," she said. "He was invested in us and what we were going to be questioned about once we got into the world as living, published authors."
Now an artist herself and friend of Tran's, Tempestt has many fond memories of sitting with Tran in his apartment over the years, talking about writing and watching him cobble together light bulbs and wooden vases and curved glass for his sculptures.
"100 Nights Of the Pandemic/100 Day Of Yearning" (Giselle Garza Lerma/S.F. Chronicle)
Back at the gallery, Tran stood in front of a multicolor pile of paper cranes cordoned by a low wood frame. Tran calls it his "ongoing, lifelong art project" with his former student, Carolyn Ho, who Tran taught 15 years ago. Tran is now godparent to Ho's son.
"On the first day of class, she walked up to me and asked me if she could fold cranes while sitting in my class, and she promised to contribute and to be present," Tran remembered. "I asked why, and she said, ‘Because it helps me with my anxiety.'"
Ho still sends Tran cranes to this day, which he safeguards and counts for her.
Another, more inconspicuous, artistic collaboration in the gallery is a light sculpture adorned with crocheting done by Tran's mother, Loc Dao, a seamstress and a fellow "rescuer" of found objects.
"I've always been a collector," he said. "It's almost a compulsion. I walk through a space like Goodwill, and I begin to imagine the stories inside the objects."
Once, Tran found a tapestry with an inscription of the person who created it and when and for whom they made it for.
"A woman had made it over the course of 20 years," he said. "It's a little heartbreaking."
The tapestry is now in Tran's apartment, awaiting new life.
