Chinatown, New York
Phuong Nguyen
No Still Waters
IRL GalleryViewing Room Phuong Nguyen (b. 1992, Toronto, Canada) is a Tkaronto-based visual artist working across representational oil painting, wood carving, ceramics, and experimental weaving. Born and raised in Tkaronto, her practice examines the entanglement of ornament, identity, and power through a sustained engagement with Ornamentalism and Orientalism. Drawing on Orientalist scholarship and the aesthetics and history of chinoiserie, Nguyen interrogates how Southeast Asian—particularly Vietnamese—femininity has been constructed as image, surface, and object of desire. Her works inhabit this terrain of projection, where beauty operates as both allure and mechanism—simultaneously seductive and disciplinary. Combining painted surfaces with carved, woven, and assembled elements, Nguyen produces hybrid works that hover between image and artifact. Across these compositions, ornament is not passive: it accumulates, repeats, and interrupts, becoming a structure through which forms are both revealed and withheld. Bodies appear fragmented, doubled, or partially obscured—caught in a constant negotiation between visibility and erasure. This tension reflects a broader inquiry into the instability of representation itself, where acts of adornment carry traces of violence, and surfaces become sites where desire, fetishization, and control are both enacted and undone. Nguyen holds a BFA from OCAD University (2014). Recent exhibitions include She Died a Death of a Thousand Cuts at the Art Gallery of Burlington, She is an Object of Beauty at Johnson Lowe Gallery, and A Familiar Distance (with Jessica Wee and Hidenori Ishii).