Vân-Nhi Nguyễn lives and works in Hà Nội, Việt Nam. Her work explores the entanglement between dreams, memories and physicality, how they define the past and the future - looking, seeing, questioning, believing. Nguyễn examines the excess of pictures in today’s image-saturated world, by looking at its (meta)physical connection with one’s own and the mass. Through staged, idealistic domestic pictures, and collages made from both stock images and her own photographs, Nguyễn looks into ways that she can create a world parallel to this through capitalistic tendencies, yet untethered. She draws from a range of disciplines, borrowing methodologies from documentary, performances, and traditional fine arts. Within each work, Nguyen creates highly considered, layered, sculptural photography through the process of image making or collecting, image “manipulation” and then rephotographing it, which are offset by conditions for speculations, and improvisation.
Nguyễn has been presented at the Aperture Foundation, V&A Parasol Foundation, Objectif Centre for Photography & Film, Hong Kong International Photography Festival, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Matca Space for Photography, amongst others. Nguyen has been awarded grants from the Aperture Foundation, V&A Museum, PhMuseum, to name a few. Her work has been reviewed and published in publications such as Aperture magazine, It’s Nice That and British Journal of Photography.
