Today we’d like to introduce you to Thinh Nguyen.
Thinh, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
“Nguyen was born in 1984 in a small village in central Vietnam. The child was quite ill and his frightened mother went to a fortune-teller for help. The psychic said that they needed to “cheat Death” by disguising the child as a female. For his first nine years, Nguyen wore dresses and learned to behave as a girl. Eventually, Death moved on and the family could treat Nguyen as a boy. Soon thereafter, the family immigrated to the United States and the male/female/male child was forced to change national identity as well.
Nguyen’s educational quest was peripatetic, moving from psychology to painting to art education to receiving an MFA in studio practices from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. Since that time, the artist has developed an art practice shaped by research and “a series of revelations.”
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
My work is informed by investigative research and from the realization that western art history is not my history, my assigned gender is not my identity, and my identity is not the product of my cultural values. Through various mediums such as photography, installation, and performance, I examine the overlapping inequity of cultural values based on gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, and the body politics — all explored as malleable and hybrid constructs of identity. The works are the result of my constant need to negotiate and weave together the contested space between cultures to find the threads that connect us all. Currently, I am working on multiple series at the same time such as “Long Live Long Long”, “I Am That I Am”, and “War Cries”:
“Long Live Long Long” is a cohesive multimedia project weaponized to dismantle the cis-normative gaze masquerades as mantra-songs, posters, vocal performance, and musical videos. Long Long is my reclaimed feminine superego from childhood memories growing up as a girl. She is my performance in power fighting for social justice. I glamorously photographed Long Long as various deities drawn from different religious iconography in wearable biomorphic sculptures that I made out of refused dresses. In evocative and tantalizing poses, the imagery conflates the historical dissident relationship between religion and sexuality. The work proposes alternative ways to imagine queer non-binary identities as enlighten and spiritual beings as oppose to historical demonized narratives from western religions. I wrote mantra-songs in reaction to our current socio-political climate for Long Long to perform live vocally as a form of protest.
“I Am That I Am” is a series of t-shirts with “I am” statements hand-painted with white or black acrylic on the front in capital letters. The “confessional identity” statements are specifically drawn from right-wing nationalist movements, and generally within the centralization of whiteness. A few examples are “I AM RACIST,” “I AM SEXIST,” “I AM TRANSPHOBIC,” “I AM XENOPHOBIC,” and so on. The t-shirts function as works of visual (painting) and performance art, as I wear them every day. They start conversations about systematic oppression with the individuals I encounter as I go about my daily life. The t-shirts are my direct-action activism.
“War Cries” is a series of watercolor paintings, which serve as a meditation on the devastation of war. The figures in these paintings are found online from war photography. By obscuring individual identity and isolating the figures on an empty background, I want to focus not on specific wars rather on the violence and loss cause by them. These paintings reflect on our intolerance and the violence we inflict upon each other, often perpetuated by the hierarchy of power within political, religious, and cultural values.
Artists face many challenges, but what do you feel is the most pressing among them?
Over the years, I’ve been doing studio visit with artists and get to hear their stories. There are common threads of hardship, financial burden, live/work situation, the lack of recognition, and most of all the need/pressure to be successful. I share with them how gardening helps me understand the meaning of growth… I think of success like that of sowing seeds, there needs to be the right conditions for things to come to fruition. The right soil, warmth, lighting, and timing for the seeds to germinate, you cannot force it even if you try. So is our career. Once it germinates, we must attend to it and weed out all the distractions that inhibit its growth like jealousy, pressure, comparison, negativity, depression, and so on. We must only need to follow the rhythm of our own growth and purpose.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
You can see my work at www.thinhstudio.com. You can support me by getting involve in my participatory projects, attend my performances and exhibitions, go to shows and events that I organize for other artists, and if you can buy my work. Send me an email and I’ll put you on my mailing list: [email protected]
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thinhstudio.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thinhstudio/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Thinh-Nguyen/100007457282984
Image Credit:
Courtesy of the artist
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