In a world during which historical past and expertise conspire to ship a ceaseless stream of probably the most incomprehensible imagery this species has ever seen, Kenny Nguyen’s undulating tapestries really feel like a miracle, providing a very new visible expertise via probably the most analog of means. They make the eyes swim in an expertise I can solely liken to the overwhelming output of the infinite algorithmic scroll, a Refik Anadol with a soul. Striated ribbons of colour — generally a whole bunch in a single piece — ripple in glitched patchworks that solely yield extra when zoomed in upon: ribbons of silk, their edges frayed and unraveling in actual time; countless recombinations of hue, form, and thickness, speckled by human accident and frequently reshaped by the shifting situations of the area.
Nguyen begins by laying out white silk so diaphanous that it billows with the slightest breeze earlier than finally succumbing to gravity. He makes small incisions into one finish of the sheet with scissors earlier than tearing it into strips. Every sequence employs a selected set and vary of hues, and he mixes and pours these acrylic paints into streaks on a big palette. Then he lays every silk strip orthogonally within the combination, letting them soak earlier than utilizing the moist paint to stick them to uncooked canvas. These bands are sometimes barely offset from one another, creating the wave formation that makes the attention quiver. These are then manipulated into the tumescent kinds earlier than us, held tentatively aloft by pushpins. It’s an accretive follow that reveals its facture: Pigment works double-time as each decoration and construction, whereas determine and floor grow to be one. The result’s an unmistakably singular presence somewhat than linked components, sinewed somewhat than stitched.
Kenny Nguyen, “Eruption Series No. 51” (2024), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
Raised on a distant coconut farm in Ben Tre Province in southern Vietnam, Nguyen moved to Ho Chi Minh Metropolis at 17 to review and work in trend design. In 2010, on the age of twenty-two, he moved to america together with his household, and he’s now based mostly in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Unfamiliar with the English language,” the press launch reads, “he began creating art, employing painting as a form of communication.” He attracts from a vernacular of colour he identifies within the press launch as particularly Vietnamese: khói lam chiều, actually “evening smoke blue”; a shade of yellow referred to as màu lúa chin, or “ripe rice color.”
Nguyen additionally debuted a brand new sequence for this exhibition, White Noise, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. These summary tapestries are drawn from his recollections of the black and white footage and pictures of the conflict so frequent in his childhood. I like that refined however essential distinction between documentation and reminiscence of documentation. Works in these sequence make use of shades of black, white, and most apparently to me, these ambiguous transition colours between the 2 — tans, khakis, true blue, Payne’s grey — set in wavering columns that actually do invoke the signature staticky graininess of a flickering picture on a ’90s CRT TV. These works are usually not parseable as figuration — they refuse that notorious and “iconic” imagery of what’s usually referred to as the “first television war.”
Set up view of two works from Kenny Nguyen’s White Noise (2025) sequence (picture courtesy Sundaram Tagore Gallery)
We individuals of colour are sometimes requested to carry out ourselves. Most frequently it is a dictate of Whiteness, both straight, as once we are tapped to interpret or mirror on occasions supposedly definitional to our identification, or ambiently, as a result of such an awesome majority of areas are White that it might probably really feel like there isn’t any backstage. Partially because of this, we are able to grow to be caught in character, and even worse, neglect this. We carry out even to one another, such that that performance-cum-reality folds into the very material of what it means to be stated identification. That is notably true for teams nonetheless attempting to forge their foundational aesthetics, which I imagine Asian Individuals are.
The hole between documentation and reminiscence in Nguyen’s work — one that may be imperfectly overlaid on that chasm between “homeland” and nation — is the place diaspora prospers. Making an attempt to shut it by performing fluency or instrumentalizing sure perceived facets of that so-called origin is antithetical to our existence. It paradoxically essentializes the very “motherland” we purport to care so deeply about, reproducing the identical transgressions for which we rightly fault others, and constraining the great and horrible complexity of diasporic expertise.
That’s why I take difficulty with statements like the next, which Nguyen makes in a video enjoying within the gallery: “I have to ignore that I learned English. I have to ignore what I’ve learned and try to remember what it would be like if I speak in these colors in Vietnamese.” I don’t fault Nguyen or the gallery for framing his work in a approach that gives some legible reference to some pure “motherland” — it’s the usual we’ve collectively set for Asian-American artwork. Moreover, artists and their galleries are sometimes not the best-equipped to talk on even their very own paintings — no shade, only a totally different set of expertise. That’s the place we writers and critics step in, and we should always achieve this extra.
Kenny Nguyen, “Encounter Series No. 44” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
I wish to be clear that I imagine Nguyen’s work embodies that very high quality I search in Asian-American artwork, and I take difficulty solely with a considerably throwaway line in how he frames his work to border my very own invective in flip. Earlier within the video, he defines “mother tongue” — the exhibition’s title — as a approach of arriving at his personal language, one with “unspoken connections” to his cultural heritage. He talks about how his identification continues to shift, which in flip adjustments his use of language. Sure.
These works converse for themselves. I imagine they do carry with them cultural authenticity — not a Vietnamese one, however somewhat a Vietnamese-American one. Their being fabricated from silk, as an illustration, is attention-grabbing not as a result of it’s freighted with a protracted and weighty materials historical past in Asia and particularly Vietnam, however as a result of that historical past bore itself as much as him when he studied and labored in trend, and took on one more layer when he embedded himself in america’s distinct sociopolitical panorama. He carries that total personal-historical equipment into these works within the mere indisputable fact that he made them. They invoke an absent physique of their swelling kinds, or maybe recommend that the physique itself accommodates absence. They’re elegiac but in addition alive.
Talking now to not Nguyen however to our ilk: Let that work breathe, like his does. Maintain making that stunning, troublesome, ambivalent artwork. Have just a little religion in us, the critics of the world, to deal with the remaining.
Element of Kenny Nguyen, “Encounter Series No. 44” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
Kenny Nguyen, “Undecided Title” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
Element of Kenny Nguyen, “Undecided Title” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
Left: Kenny Nguyen, “Nesting Ground Series” (2024), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall; proper: element
Kenny Nguyen, “Eruption Series No. 78” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
Left: Kenny Nguyen, “Eruption Series No. 82” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall; proper: Kenny Nguyen, “Eruption Series No. 81” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
Video detailing Kenny Nguyen’s course of
Set up view of Kenny Nguyen, “Encounter Series No.51” (2025), hand-cut silk material, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall
Kenny Nguyen: Mom Tongue continues at Sundaram Tagore Gallery (542 West twenty sixth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) via Might 31. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
