It’s compelling to think about Tammy Nguyen’s work by the lens of semantics—as phrases, annotations, doodles, photographs and symbols drawn from a spread of sources coalesce into a brand new code throughout a stratified floor that displays the density of human historical past. This method is particularly pronounced in her newest physique of labor, which marks her New York debut with Lehmann Maupin, following her 2022 signing with the gallery and a solo exhibition in London final 12 months.
In her layered visible compositions, saturated with indicators and which means, the premise of Nguyen’s semiotically charged follow turns into clear. Layering right here isn’t simply aesthetic—it builds a visible code that’s each private and common, one which resists easy translation however insists on the complexity of historical past, reminiscence and notion.
Chatting with Observer a number of weeks after the present’s opening, Nguyen described this visible saturation as a type of maximalist pleasure. “I’m all the time drawn to a way of fullness—a whole, holistic house,” she mirrored, likening the semantic and visible density of her work to the expertise of strolling by a forest. “A forest is that this dense pure house that all the time presents a alternative—you may select to understand it intimately, figuring out each leaf and species, which brings one type of enlightenment. Or you may select to not know, and easily breathe all of it in, permitting your self to really feel it totally and immerse your self in it, which presents a distinct type of enlightenment.”
Whereas the obvious chaos and sedimentation of motifs in Nguyen’s work could appear intuitive at first look, it’s in truth anchored in exact historic references—each in content material and method. Within the exhibition, every portray is executed on paper laminated onto a Gatorboard panel, starting with a extra instinctive course of utilizing
Two distinct traditions converge on this layering of strategies and supplies. On one hand, the usage of brushwork and mark-making evokes an Japanese portray sensibility, drawing a connection to the good calligraphers of China and Japan and the best way landscapes are historically conceived on a vertical airplane. On the opposite, the intensive printing course of displays Nguyen’s background in bookmaking, a self-discipline that informs her follow not solely by its layered materiality and formal construction but in addition in its narrative method.
The New York present, “A Comedy for Mortals: Paradiso,” marks the fruits of a three-part exhibition sequence anchored in Nguyen’s studying of Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s canonical masterpiece of Western literature. The ultimate epic act, Paradiso, is a profoundly non secular story—but in addition a deeply secular one. Dante follows his beloved Beatrice into the celestial heavens, looking for to transcend earthly attachments and passions in pursuit of a extra common liberation by religion. But the journey just isn’t solely romantic or non secular; it is usually framed within the textual content as a quest for limitless information.
“The method of acquiring information is described as consuming the bread of angels, and that picture was so highly effective and provoking to me that I selected to make use of it as a guiding idea for the present,” Nguyen explains. “I started to attract a connection between this concept of coming into the next realm of understanding and the nuclear arms race.”
A lot of the imagery within the exhibition emerges from our simultaneous fascination with and concern of nuclear warfare. For Nguyen, the theme is deeply private. As a Vietnamese-American whose dad and mom fled the nation, she has lengthy been drawn to the psychological and historic terrain of the Vietnam Warfare and the Chilly Warfare. Particularly, she has been within the idea of the “proxy warfare”—conflicts wherein world superpowers just like the U.S. and the Soviet Union prevented direct confrontation by backing opposing sides throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. As Nguyen explains, inside these oblique battles, the ideological stakes of empire and resistance unfold most vividly—and most tragically.
Each the concept of proxy warfare and the enduring risk of nuclear battle really feel hauntingly resonant as we speak. Inside this context, a central concern of Nguyen’s follow is tracing how world ideologies are inscribed onto particular person lives and landscapes—embedded into the material of each day expertise and lengthening their attain by environmental contamination and the quiet misappropriation of which means. “My present work typically begins with an investigation into what shapes an ideology—what types dogma, what constructs a mind-set,” she explains.
This dissonant polysemy and polyphony of symbols and pictures provides rise to a type of fiction that compels the viewer to actively decode and interpret a dense ocean of knowledge. On this approach, her work are usually not merely representations but in addition performances of meaning-making, collapsing the boundaries between picture and language, fable and historical past, notion and beliefs.
In Nguyen’s fingers, these advanced translinguistic and transcultural surfaces—woven from symbols, marginal notes, organic illustrations, literary references, historic paperwork and maps—turn into a strategy to interrogate how information and which means are created, structured, framed and weaponized, typically in service of the equipment of colonialism, science and mushy energy.
On the identical time, Nguyen’s grounding of her work in canonical texts and symbolic techniques throughout time serves as an try to reread latest geopolitical historical past—unveiling how recurring patterns echo enduring elements of human habits. “I actually loved utilizing canonical texts in that approach, making a reference to individuals who don’t share my historical past,” she notes.
Nguyen intentionally performs with archetypal materials and historic tropes, weaving collectively a number of layers of which means and interconnection between private expertise, political paperwork, recurring historic circumstances and fable. Her work resists linear storytelling, embracing as an alternative the entropic logic of a visible and semantic cacophony. This cacophony not solely displays the chaos and misinformation of our time but in addition affirms the pressing want for a multiperspective method—one which acknowledges the layered complexity of world society and the interconnected nature of human historical past.
The work within the present are populated by distinct figures and symbols—eagles and Frankenstein collide in an absurdist collapse of house, time and which means, alongside fragments just like the moon touchdown. “I’m taking these recognizable characters or symbols just like the eagle or Frankenstein and utilizing them as mental units,” Nguyen explains. “However I’m additionally transforming them as emotional automobiles to discover totally different conflicts, tensions and realms of darkness.”
Drawing from public archives and declassified supplies, Nguyen incorporates fragments comparable to Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Disaster notes and Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell deal with—what may initially seem as doodles are, in truth, poignant testaments to the human perspective behind the so-called nice males of historical past. The result’s a layered cosmology of which means, one which blurs the boundary between public historical past and private mythology, inviting a extra advanced and stratified studying of historic occasions and their reverberations within the on a regular basis lives of abnormal individuals.
In the end, what Nguyen’s artwork represents is way over a flat portray—it’s a palimpsest of multilevel semantics, with every layer working in line with its personal inner logic, translating actuality into a definite code in an effort to make which means communicable. Her multilayered narration of latest historical past unfolds throughout the work, exposing the trauma and drama of its implications and dystopian overtones—solely to shift, all of a sudden and ominously, right into a warning: that these occasions might already be repeating earlier than our eyes, unnoticed by an inattentive or oversaturated gaze.
But, as Nguyen’s work suggests, there stays a hope for salvation within the information and expertise humanity has amassed over centuries—an pressing return to mythic and epic narratives as residing repositories of ancestral reality that may information us by rupture. Retrieving a deeper reminiscence embedded in collective expertise—a symbolic language older than any mundane disaster—turns into the pathway by chaos, a way of reorientation and survival in troubled instances. Her follow turns into an act of mythopoiesis: a name to re-enter the symbolic order and reimagine our existential and political place inside the tangled narratives of survival, battle and which means, as restricted mortals nonetheless aspiring to seek out function in our existence.
Tammy Nguyen’s “A Comedy for Mortals: Paradiso” is on view at Lehmann Maupin by August 15, 2025.
Extra in Artists
