Broaching themes particularly pertinent to the local community, Nguyen investigate questions of origin, memory, and belonging in relation to place and landscape. The domestic and the role of humans in society are also themes probed in her work.

 

Nguyen employment of material spans weighty mediums like cement, metal and wood to lighter and more ephemeral ones like paper, and dust. Through abstract and biomorphic forms, her experimental works concurrently allude to the historic circulation of products and people, to cycles of life, death and rebirth, to concerns over environmental collapse, as well as notions of individual history, intergenerational exchange and inherited trauma.

 

Using habitats as the basis, her practice employs innovative strategies to engage spectators. Nguyen work seeks to decolonise processes of narrative construction by considering both ruptures brought on by colonial histories and the impact of modern-day industrialisation. The inclusion of my personal interpretation of historical documents considers cohabitation as an aesthetic form.

 

Nguyen works pay heed to the (slow) process of knowledge production, in which intellectual rigour is prioritised so that an analytical and heterogeneous space might re-catalyse her thinking. In the process of making her work, the past is used to reconsider and reconfigure processes of knowledge production in the present.