Curated by
March 28, 2025
-
April 23, 2025
Curated by Anh Đào Hà
With works by Tra My Nguyễn, Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Z.T. Nguyễn, Vy Trịnh, and Hạ-Lan Văn
Opening Reception: Friday, March 28, 6-8pm
NARS Main Gallery
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Architectures of Intimacy, an exhibition featuring works by Tra My Nguyễn, Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Z.T. Nguyễn, Vy Trịnh, and Hạ-Lan Văn. The exhibition examines the material logic of Vietnamese spaces, where objects shift between roles, blending the practical with the poetic. Through sculpture, photography, textiles, and mixed media, these artists explore how everyday materials shape memory, labor, and transformation.
Taking its name from Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s concept of architectures of intimacy, the exhibition highlights how Vietnamese spaces are built on improvisation, humor, and adaptability. A room divider becomes a wall, a garment becomes motorbike parts, and objects take on new lives without losing their history. Vy Trịnh maps these material networks in Saigon, where repurposing is a way of life. Tra-My Nguyễn reflects on the motorbike as both a daily necessity and a site of cultural meaning, recalling its place in childhood memories and globalized perceptions. Vân-Nhi Nguyễn stages photographs that blur past and present, where nostalgia meets the rhythms of contemporary life.
Memory is embedded in materials, not as nostalgia, but as a way of seeing. Hạ-Lan Văn carves wooden totems that could belong in traditional craft villages but reshapes them into unexpected forms, shifting how tradition is understood. Z.T. Nguyễn layers paper and packaging in ways that echo the quiet acts of preservation, where even the most disposable materials are saved and repurposed.
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s term architectures of intimacy originally examined the relationships between Asian American designers and immigrant garment workers, revealing disparities in labor and cultural recognition. Similar dynamics emerge in how these artists engage with Vietnam’s material landscape. Tu critiques the tendency to fixate on singular cultural symbols, warning that such representations risk flattening complex realities into digestible, marketable icons. In contrast, the works in this exhibition reflect the inherent adaptability of Vietnamese life: the ability to find poetry in the everyday and transform materials without erasing their histories.
Rather than presenting Vietnam as a static spectacle, these artists engage with its evolving spaces of improvisation. Their works reflect a material language shaped by floral prints, dark wood, aluminum, plastic, and objects that shift between function and meaning. Architectures of Intimacy does not offer a singular narrative but instead underscores Vietnam’s ever-changing nature, shaped by movement, adaptation, and the poetic rhythms of daily life. By resisting fixed definitions, the exhibition creates space for an ongoing dialogue, allowing Vietnam to be seen as dynamic, resourceful, and continually unfolding.
About the curator:
Anh Đào Hà is an artist, curator, and arts administrator based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary practice integrates research, writing, curation, and design to bridge personal narratives with broader cultural and material studies. Through an exploration of everyday objects, materials, and pop culture, her work examines their role in shaping collective memory and human infrastructures.
Hà’s practice is ever evolving between Saigon and New York City, fostering a dialogue between the art worlds of each city. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including NYCxDESIGN and Chinatown Soup, among others. She was an artist in residence at AIRHue in Hue, Vietnam. She holds a BFA in Product & Industrial Design from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Literary Studies from The New School. She currently works at bitforms gallery.
About the artists:
Tra My Nguyễn, (b. 1992, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, moving image, installation, and textiles. Her practice recontextualises material culture through a diasporic lens, investigating the intersections of the body with power structures and histories of resilience, agency, and transformation. Deploying speculative narratives, her work explores themes of embodiment and commodification within a globalised framework.
Nguyen’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (DE), Bienalsur (AR), VCCA Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VN), and the State of Fashion Biennale (NL). She has presented solo and duo exhibitions at Grotto (Berlin) and Human Resources (Los Angeles), among others. In 2020, she received the Fashion Position Jury Prize and is currently participating in the BPA// Berlin program for artists.
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.
Z.T. Nguyễn, (b. 1997, he/him or they/them) is an artist whose drawing practice explores the psychological space located between stasis and change. His works utilize monochromatic washes of alarming colors and unsettling imagery to illustrate feelings of tension, contemplation, and desire. Lightly creased and constructed from 8.5 x 11” sheets of paper for ease of storage or transportation, many of Nguyen's drawings can be folded down to a fraction of their total size: a meditation on touch, secrecy, portability, and resourcefulness.
Nguyen lives and works in New Haven, CT. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting & Printmaking at Yale University School of Art, and received a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. Nguyen has participated in exhibitions at Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York; Asia Art Archive in America, Brooklyn; the RISD Museum, Providence; Transmitter, Brooklyn; and Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn; among other venues in the US and internationally. He has participated in residencies and fellowships at Textile Arts Center, The Alternative Art School & MAIIAM Contemporary Art Musuem (online), and Asia Art Archive in America. In May of 2025, Nguyen will have his first solo exhibition at island, New York.
Vy Trịnh, (b. 1996, Ho Chi Minh City) is a Vietnamese sculptor whose work explores how objects and their networks fluctuate between the domestic and public and extend beyond themselves, reflecting and reimagining the larger socio-economic textures and conditions of contemporary Vietnam.
Materials and objects are sourced and amalgamated from different economies and ecologies—tracing the polyrhythmic, cyclical, and sedimented lives of human and non-human things at both the local, urban, and planetary scales, bridging the gap between intimacy and circulation.
Through manual making methodology, the interior and exterior environments of her works bleed together. Her practice is always “becoming”, following the traffic of objects, different forms of gendered labour and agency, and the sites where these categories are constantly being negotiated and improvised.
Vy holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. Solo exhibitions and projects include On Da Dream at Galerie Quynh (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) and Overvoltage at Gia Lam Train Station (Hanoi, Vietnam)
Selected group exhibitions include Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Shisanwu LLC (Queens, NY), Worthless Studios (Brooklyn, NY), Atelier (Philadelphia, PA), Automat (Philadelphia, PA), White Columns (New York, NY), and Gallery MC (New York, NY). Her work has been published and reviewed on Artforum, Frieze, Foundwork, and Artnet. She was the recipient of the 2022 Christopher Lyon Memorial Award. Vy also received grants from Vietnam Art Collection (VAC), Humanities Urbanism Design Initiative (H+U+D), The Sachs Program for Art Innovation, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Her works are in the collection of Nguyen Art Foundation and other private collections.
Vy currently lives and works between Ho Chi Minh City, Philadelphia, and New York.
Hạ-Lan Văn, (b. 2000) is a sculptor whose practice is inspired by the lives of materials, the capacity of tools, and the courageous and generous process of making. She is interested in how carving can be a process of improvisational choice-making, wandering, and clarification — how carving is a process to make sense of land and adopted wood.
Born and raised in Oregon, USA, Hạ-Lan graduated from Parsons School of Design in 2023. Hạ-Lan is currently based in Saigon, working with District Eight and Vietnamese craftspeople to create contemporary forms for home life with traditional craft and local material knowledge. She is a steward at 187 Our Studio, a communal place for DIY making in Chợ Lớn.
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