Trung Pham (@trungphamstudio) (Vietnamese American, 1974–), “Wound 19,” “Wound 20,” and “Wound 14,” 2015.

Trung Pham is a Saigon-born, Seattle-based artist, educator, and Jesuit priest whose refugee experience and religious devotion have profoundly influenced his artistic practice. His academic concentration in his licentiate of sacred theology program was theological aesthetics, and he wrote his thesis on Joseph Ratzinger’s (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) notion of “extreme beauty”—that is, beauty not as sentimental loveliness but as love that goes to the very end, and which appears in the torn and disfigured flesh of Christ.

The three artworks shown here are part of a series of highly textural paintings that portray violent gashes. Paint is built up off the canvas like clotted blood—difficult to look at—but this “blood” is highlighted with gold, suggesting a suffering that’s redemptive. Pham said he wished to convey beauty in vulnerability and brokenness and hopes that viewers will see not just a slashing sense of violation but also a tenderness and fragility. Woundedness is universal, so the wounds could be read as any physical, spiritual, social, or psychological rift, or they could be read more particularly as Christ’s spear-split side.

“I am doing theology through art. For art and for the church,” Pham says.