Kenny Nguyen creates expansive, dimensional, mixed-media paintings that center on ideas of cultural identity, displacement and integration. Nguyen uses color and silk as a way of mapping memories to visually de- and re-construct his own identity. He begins by tearing swaths of natural silk fabric into hundreds of strips that he dips in acrylic paint and adheres to raw canvas. Methodically, almost meditatively, he repeats the process—tearing, painting, sanding, sewing, weaving, attaching, layering—until he has a structured but malleable medium, which he shapes into undulating, sculpted forms. A repeated process of destruction and reconstruction, Nguyen's practice has become the bond that has fashioned both of his cultures together, and a mode of both exploration and reflection.
Nguyen grew up on a coconut farm in a rural area near the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam amongst many silk farms. Despite having established a career in fashion design, he decided to join his family when they moved to the United States in 2010. Acclimating to an American way of life proved uneasy at first, especially with a language barrier that intensified feelings of alienation and isolation. Nguyen turned to art-making as a coping mechanism and as a means to express himself in a more universal language. He began to cultivate an artistic practice centered around silk, to explore his personal and cultural identity. In addition to its significance to Nguyen’s background in fashion, silk has long been a symbol of wealth and beauty in Vietnam, and that status has shaped Vietnam's economics, policy and culture for thousands of years.
Nguyen has pushed the medium and developed a distinctive technique to produce sensual, three-dimensional works that he describes as “deconstructed paintings.” Informed by his training in fashion, he often installs each piece sculpturally with pushpins, allowing him the flexibility to rehang or adjust the composition as desired. The works can be stretched flat like a traditional canvas or gently draped, folded and creased into animated structures that unfurl along the wall and pool at the floor. Each installation is unique. Nguyen views the resulting malleable forms as embodying to the transformations of each of our identities over time. In some ways, Nguyen’s approach of deconstruction and reconstruction is akin to the experience of growing into his identity as Vietnamese American and as an artist. His use of silk, which remains the primary material in his practice, has evolved alongside him. Where he once chose it for its splendor and sense of familiarity, through a rigorous process of transformation, it now holds greater meaning for the artist: “For me, silk has become the connector tying both cultures together.”
Nguyen’s compositions range from minimal, stoic works more akin to Western color field painting to dynamic and fragmented abstractions, bursting and flowing with movement and color. In his recent, more quieted and elemental pieces, Nguyen used sand and dirt in these works to create more texture. The result is structured, almost topographic, compositions where forms steadily float amongst sandy neutrals. When getting lost in the lucidity of Nguyen’s more chromatic undulations, it is evident that Nguyen has found full control over his created craft. His mastery of his once-experimental media has positioned Nguyen as a conductor, and, in each of his series, he has orchestrated a dialectical harmony. In Vietnamese, words that denote colors are incredibly specific, infused with descriptive meanings and references, giving Nguyen an extraordinary perspective on the dynamism of color as a visual language in addition to an aesthetic expression. Colors become a language for memory and place, and Nguyen decisively engages this language through the specific meanings and precise combinations of colors to tell the story of his experience.
Kenny Nguyen was born in in Ben Tre Province of Vietnam in 1990. Nguyen graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Fashion Design from National University of Art and Architecture, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2010. He later graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in Charlotte, NC, in 2015. Nguyen’s recent solo exhibitions include those at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Singapore; Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; Sugarlift Gallery. New York, New York; Sozo Gallery, Charlotte North Carolina; Deiglan Gilfelagio Gallery, Akureyri, Iceland; and M Gallery, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum, South Korea. Nguyen has participated in group exhibitions across the globe, including at Sotheby’s, London, UK; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA (forthcoming); the Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul; CICA Museum (Czong Institute for Contemporary Art), Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, Korea; Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf, Germany; LaGrange Art Museum, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California; and The Rayburn House Office Building, United States Capitol Complex, Washington, DC. In 2016, Nguyen received the Excellence Asia Contemporary Young Artist Award from Sejong Museum of Art and in 2023, he received a nomination for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship. In 2024, Nguyen also received the Asian Art in London’s Modern & Contemporary Asian Art Award, presented by Sotheby’s. He has been awarded numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies, unlcuding but not limed to the Artist Residency Fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Chicago, IL; The Hambidge Center, GA; Vermont Studio Center, VT; Gil Artist Residency, Akureyri, Iceland; Château d'Orquevaux, Orquevaux, France; and AIR Guidiguada Gran Canaria, Spain. Kenny Nguyen lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina.