In a world in which history and technology conspire to deliver a ceaseless stream of the most incomprehensible imagery this species has ever seen, Kenny Nguyen’s undulating tapestries feel like a miracle, offering a truly new visual experience through the most analog of means. They make the eyes swim in an experience I can only liken to the overwhelming output of the infinite algorithmic scroll, a Refik Anadol with a soul. Striated ribbons of color — sometimes hundreds in a single piece — ripple in glitched patchworks that only yield more when zoomed in upon: ribbons of silk, their edges frayed and unraveling in real time; endless recombinations of hue, shape, and thickness, speckled by human accident and continually reshaped by the shifting conditions of the space.
Nguyen begins by laying out white silk so diaphanous that it billows with the slightest breeze before eventually succumbing to gravity. He makes small incisions into one end of the sheet with scissors before tearing it into strips. Each series employs a specific set and range of hues, and he mixes and pours those acrylic paints into streaks on a large palette. Then he lays each silk strip orthogonally in the mixture, letting them soak before using the wet paint to adhere them to raw canvas. These bands are often slightly offset from each other, creating the wave formation that makes the eye quiver. These are then manipulated into the tumescent forms before us, held tentatively aloft by pushpins. It is an accretive practice that reveals its facture: Pigment works double-time as both ornament and structure, while figure and ground become one. The result is an unmistakably singular presence rather than connected parts, sinewed rather than stitched.
Raised on a remote coconut farm in Ben Tre Province in southern Vietnam, Nguyen moved to Ho Chi Minh City at 17 to study and work in fashion design. In 2010, at the age of 22, he moved to the United States with his family, and he’s now based in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Unfamiliar with the English language,” the press release reads, “he began creating art, employing painting as a form of communication.” He draws from a vernacular of color he identifies in the press release as specifically Vietnamese: khói lam chiều, literally “evening smoke blue”; a shade of yellow called màu lúa chin, or “ripe rice color.”
Nguyen also debuted a new series for this exhibition, White Noise, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. These abstract tapestries are drawn from his memories of the black and white footage and photos of the war so common in his childhood. I love that subtle but crucial distinction between documentation and memory of documentation. Works in these series employ shades of black, white, and most interestingly to me, those ambiguous transition colors between the two — tans, khakis, true blue, Payne’s gray — set in wavering columns that really do invoke the signature staticky graininess of a flickering image on a ’90s CRT TV. These works are not parseable as figuration — they refuse that infamous and “iconic” imagery of what is often called the “first television war.”
We people of color are often asked to perform ourselves. Most often this is a dictate of Whiteness, either directly, as when we are tapped to interpret or reflect on events supposedly definitional to our identity, or ambiently, because such an overwhelming majority of spaces are White that it can feel like there is no backstage. Partially as a result, we can become stuck in character, and even worse, forget this. We perform even to each other, such that that performance-cum-reality folds into the very fabric of what it means to be said identity. This is particularly true for groups still trying to forge their foundational aesthetics, which I believe Asian Americans are.
The gap between documentation and memory in Nguyen’s work — one that can be imperfectly overlaid on that chasm between “homeland” and nation — is where diaspora flourishes. Trying to close it by performing fluency or instrumentalizing certain perceived aspects 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 same transgressions for which we rightly fault others, and constraining the wonderful and terrible complexity of diasporic experience.
That’s why I take issue with statements like the following, which Nguyen makes in a video playing in 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 way that offers some legible reference to some pure “motherland” — it’s the standard we’ve collectively set for Asian-American art. Besides, artists and their galleries are often not the best-equipped to speak on even their own artwork — no shade, just a different set of skills. That’s where we writers and critics step in, and we should do so more.
I want to be clear that I believe Nguyen’s work embodies that very quality I seek in Asian-American art, and I take issue only with a somewhat throwaway line in how he frames his work to frame my own invective in turn. Earlier in the video, he defines “mother tongue” — the exhibition’s title — as a way of arriving at his own language, one with “unspoken connections” to his cultural heritage. He talks about how his identity continues to shift, which in turn changes his use of language. Yes.
These works speak for themselves. I believe they do carry with them cultural authenticity — not a Vietnamese one, but rather a Vietnamese-American one. Their being made of silk, for instance, is interesting not because it is freighted with a long and weighty material history in Asia and specifically Vietnam, but because that history bore itself up to him when he studied and worked in fashion, and took on yet another layer when he embedded himself in the United States’s distinct sociopolitical landscape. He carries that entire personal-historical apparatus into these works in the mere fact that he made them. They invoke an absent body in their swelling forms, or perhaps suggest that the body itself contains absence. They are elegiac but also alive.
Speaking now not to Nguyen but to our ilk: Let that work breathe, like his does. Keep making that beautiful, difficult, ambivalent art. Have a little faith in us, the critics of the world, to take care of the rest.
Kenny Nguyen: Mother Tongue continues at Sundaram Tagore Gallery (542 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through May 31. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
This is a beautifully done piece, Lisa! Thank you so much. It’s both an empathetic appreciation of Nguyen’s art and art-making process … AND an eloquent primer on some of the best ideas circulating these days in postcolonial and diaspora studies these days. Several of your insights in this essay apply to the work of important contemporary writers too, including those of another Nguyen, Viet Thanh. (I’m thinking of his essays and his novels The Sympathizer and The Committed, as well as the HBO series made from the former.)
Fabulous! A gift to learn of this artist and have so many examples of his work included in the article. OMG! Your detailed account of Nguyen’s process is welcome, as process is major determinant of each work’s place and significance. In so large a body of work the artist, in their process, display a radical confidence that, in relation to nothing else in the work, becomes force. All that: thank you.
A couple comments:
I wish dimensions were included in the captions. I can estimate, from the electrical-outlet cover below #51, the approximate size of that work, then estimate from the width of the silk strips the scale of others. But actual dimensions would be helpful.
My second comment is to take issue with your high-handed assessment of the critical capability of an artist’s gallerist and that of the artist themselves. Excuse me?
Up front I’ll admit to the nonnegotiable fact of the authorial fallacy. But that fallacy pertains not to inadequate skill, but to another fact of criticism: neither the artist, nor anyone else, has a corner on interpretation of that artist’s work. This can get out of control. Stanley Fish’s notorious comment that “my product is readings” sums up the intense and sometimes flip critical competition of the late 20th century. And an idle reading without the author’s moral investment is worthless advice. Nevertheless, from the shark tank came the wall we all face: we are bound to our own perceptions. Claims to authoritativeness are absurd.
Consider the relative status of artist and critic toward the artist’s work. The artist lives the process, lives with the art, and takes in critique from all sides. For years or, in most cases, decades this is the evolving context for the artist’s expert critique of their own work. And the artist is, in fact, the artist, the ultimate expert. The artist is the efficient cause and at least a substantial part of the final cause of their art. They were in the room where it happened.
Now, some artists claim a sort of ignorance (“it just comes to me”). There are some whose practices are so theoretically crowded and overdetermined that their self-critique is incoherent. Some are, as you say, just not—or not yet—equipped to articulate what they do. Some hedge and some are flat disingenuous. But all are there they are at ground zero living and breathing their art. All have access to tremendous context and depth of practical, if not theoretical, understanding. No one—no one—knows the art better.
Tha com critic. Maybe the critic has followed the artist’s development. Maybe the critic has a fair understanding of the artist’s context: personally, immediately and historically. But the critic shows up with their own kit, their own critical slant, their own context. They get out their chosen critical tools, which tools are themselves entirely determine what the critic can see and articulate. The critic then observes. The critic then of course puts in the hours. They take it all in. They come back and take it all in again. They consider everything in light of itself and of its context. They then articulate a critique that gets heads nodding. Then they move on.
Which is more the expert on the artist’s work? It’s likely the artist sees most clearly the bark of the tree immediately in front of them, while the critic sees the artist’s tree as one in a forest, a world, a cosmos. But where’s the so what?
Go further. I once asked a guy who mowed lawns for a living a practical question about a piece I was working on. He looked. He thought. He gave his answer. And he was right. He had seen my work close enough to how I see it that his comment solved a problem for me. That’s one example of a foundational critical assumption: any human who will engage with a work of art will have useful commentary to the extent of their engagement. Underlying that assumption is another: art is humans talking to humans. By definition, anyone’s engaged critique is as valid as any other. Some, like the critic, are highly skilled in articulation, making their commentary broadly illuminating. But guys who mow lawns, people who “don’t know anything about art” —and don’t, four year olds: they’re all worth listening to.
So. I found your critique of Nguyen’s work fascinating and insightful. I had to read some twice because you challenged assumptions I didn’t even know I had. That’s your job and you do it very well. You come to the work with, in your eyes, a proper and well-developed apparatus. Well of course you do. Nguyen’s a human; you’re a human. You’re in. And you have a coterie and readership who agree that your apparatus is a good one. Frankly, I’m one of those. I’m bought in; I read your critique thinking, “Wow, that’s got it. Gee, I wish I could do that.” Further, I’m still struggling to see into my own work with an apparatus like yours, or at least within the beltway around it. But your claim that artists and gallerists often lack a valid apparatus of their own to interpret the artist’s work is absurd and pretentious. Stay in your lane.