TAMMY NGUYEN

Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersectionsbetween geopolitics, ecology, and history, using narrative tointertwine disparate subjects through artmaking. Across hermediums, Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and the tensionbetween her elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics oftenbelies the nature of her storytelling. She probes this contrastbetween form and content by confusing the visual plane, whichshe achieves by creating intricate visual metaphors nestledwithin many layers of diverse material. Nguyen works withwatercolour and vinyl paint, repeatedly obscuring and revealingher subjects to build friction.

In Nguyen’s version of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s three epicsact as a metaphor for the geopolitics of Southeast Asia duringthe Cold War. Nguyen constructs narratives that explore themoral gray areas that permeate global history, probing the powerlanguage has to shape these ambiguities. Her world building isoften ripe with inversion—in Inferno, Nguyen tracked Dante andVirgil’s descent into hell against the Space Race—up is down,day is night, and large is small. In Purgatorio, as Dante seeks topurify his soul by ascending Mount Purgatory with Virgil as hisguide, Nguyen plots a simultaneous descent into her version ofthe Grasberg Mine (a project conducted in West Irian, Indonesiafrom the 1930s–80s).

The paintings in Purgatorio are united in formal qualitiesbut marked by distinct characters—from statuesque angelsappropriated from Gianlorenzo Bernini sculptures, to prehistoricdinosaurs, to a host of international leaders from the 1955Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Nguyen immerses thesecharacters in a lexicon of imagery that sets the scene for herversion of purgatory, which takes the form of an island thatexists in liminal time and space, each occupant a kind of refugeein an eternal state of waiting. In Angels Carrying Crosses onMount Purgatory (2023), angels ascend the canvas, nocturnalluna moths trace the path of the moon, seashells dot the skylike stars, and ancient fern fronds rhythmically punctuate thepicture plane. In Natural Love is Always Inerrant (2024), JesusChrist himself arrives by boat to the shores of purgatory, bearinga crucifix; the composition is divided in two, the figure at centre framed by sunset on the left and sunrise on the right.

During the Cold War, Southeast Asian countries were contendingwith the anxiety of both looming conflict (augmented by thedestruction wreaked by the atomic bomb in Japan) and theirnew sovereignty. Here, ancient monsters reference this kindof existential and ever-present menace. In several paintings,including Love Can Never Turn its Sight (2024) and WhatSin is Purged Here in the Circle Where We are Standing?(2024), prehistoric dinosaurs emerge from and retreat into thesurrounding fauna. Nguyen’s dinosaurs allude to one monster inparticular—Godzilla, whose depiction first developed in 1950sJapan. In this way, the dinosaurs in Purgatorio reference thecontinued threat of atomic warfare and serve as a vehicle forthe address of traumas past. Other works, such as I Pray toGod That This Asian-African Conference Succeeds (2024) andWorld Peace is Not Merely the Absence of War (2024), depictindividuals who were present at the Bandung Conference,where African and Asian leaders gathered to imagine a futureindependent from Western influence and control. These figurespermeate the environment of purgatory, gesturing towards theendurance of ideas and resistance.

A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio culminates in a large-scaleartist book entitled Mine, Purgatory (2024), which itself takesthe form of a mountain and opens inwards like a mine. Witheach turn of the page, the reader descends into the mountain,growing closer to the center. The pages themselves containexcerpts from both the Bandung Conference and Dante’s cantosin Purgatorio; Nguyen manipulates the stanzas to create her ownidiosyncratic translation, which becomes increasingly completeas one reaches the end of the book. As the cantos conclude withDante’s discovery of his true love, Nguyen’s reader approachesthe center of the mine, and treasure is unveiled: at the base ofthe book is the golden imprint of a dinosaur foot. Through aninvestigation of the materiality of language, Nguyen’s artist bookin A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio offers a paradigm for theformation of both identity and history, and in their intersection,probes the good, the bad, and the morally ambiguous.

Press release courtesy Lehmann Maupin