KENNY NGUYEN: MOTHER TONGUE
For Mother Tongue, his first solo exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, Kenny Nguyen (b. 1990, Bến Tre Province, Vietnam) presents a series of new sculptural installations composed of silk strips. Drawing inspiration from Vietnamese literature and color symbolism, the North Carolina–based artist explores the emotional and cultural dimensions of color through vibrant, textured works. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and includes selected pieces from his new series White Noise, a project rooted in Nguyen’s childhood memories—black-and-white images of war drawn from photographs and films that permeated his visual world.
Raised on a remote coconut plantation in southern Vietnam, Nguyen moved to Ho Chi Minh City at the age of 17 to study fashion design. After an initial career as a designer, he decided in 2010 to leave everything behind and start over in the United States with his family. With little knowledge of English, he turned to visual art as an alternative language, and painting became his means of communication.
Silk—a material deeply embedded in Vietnamese culture—quickly became central to his artistic practice. “Silk may seem delicate, but it’s the strongest natural fiber on earth. It reflects resilience,” he says. From this foundation, Nguyen developed a unique technique: he hand-cuts silk into strips, immerses them in a mixture of acrylic colors, and applies them to raw canvas, using the still-wet paint as adhesive. The result is a three-dimensional surface, both structured and flexible, sculpted into undulating forms and mounted on the wall with pushpins.
Nguyen’s early works were predominantly monochromatic, but over time he began to infuse his pieces with the colors of his homeland. When trying to translate certain hues, he encountered the limitations of the English language and rediscovered instead the rich symbolic depth of Vietnamese color vocabulary: “We use colors to express emotion, history, landscape, and the life of our people. In many ways, they reflect the whole country,” he explains. One example is khói lam chiều, which translates to “evening smoke blue,” a grayish-blue tone evoking the dusk sky and the smoke rising from village homes. Another is màu lúa chín, or “ripe rice yellow,” which conjures the vibrant color of the rice fields during harvest season.
In Vietnamese culture, color is also a vessel for deep emotion. Nguyen recalls a historic poem describing a soldier’s departure through emerald green mulberry fields, watched by his beloved. That shade of green, he says, becomes a symbol of the pain of separation.
Throughout the exhibition, color functions as both poetic and cultural signifier. Some works are marked by a deep crimson-maroon—a hue commonly found in Buddhist temples and a nod to spiritual tradition—while others are streaked with reddish-purple, recalling the color of xôi, a traditional Vietnamese sticky rice dish cooked with magenta-tinted plant leaves.
White Noise, Nguyen’s new series premiering on the occasion of the anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, reflects on the visual and emotional legacy of that conflict. These works, characterized by subtle black-and-white tones, evoke vintage photographs and documentaries that accompanied the artist’s childhood and today speak to the collective memory of the Vietnamese diaspora in America.
Kenny Nguyen: Mother Tongue is on view through May 31, 2025, at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 542 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001. Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00 AM–6:00 PM. Info: PH +1 212 677 4520 | https://www.sundaramtagore.com/exhibitions/kenny-nguyen2
Kenny Nguyen lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has participated in exhibitions across the globe, including at the Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul; CICA Museum (Czong Institute for Contemporary Art), Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, Korea; Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf, Germany; LaGrange Art Museum, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Florida; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California; and The Rayburn House Office Building, United States Capitol Complex, Washington, DC. In 2024, Nguyen’s work was the subject of the solo exhibition Kenny Nguyen: Adaptations at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. His work is currently on view in Hoa Tay (Flower Hands) the at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, which showcases work by leading Southern artists from the Vietnamese diaspora. The exhibition commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. In 2016, Nguyen received the Excellence Asia Contemporary Young Artist Award from Sejong Museum of Art; in 2023, a nomination for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship; and in 2024, Asian Art in London’s Modern & Contemporary Art Award for a work from his Eruption series. He has been awarded numerous grants, fellowships and residencies.
