Kenny Nguyen creates "deconstructed paintings." These large, colorful mixed media works are comprised of hundreds of silk strips, which Nguyen cuts, paints, and meticulously applies onto canvas. The pieces may be hung sculpturally on the wall with undulations or flat, stretched like a painting on bars or behind glass. Nguyen's process mirrors the artists' own self, a hybrid of blended cultures and ideas, bringing to light the ways in which identity is constructed and in a constant state of change.
Kenny Nguyen grew up in southern Vietnam on a coconut farm among the many silk farms of the region. Nguyen was admitted to the National School of Art and Architecture in Ho Chi Minh City, where he studied fashion design. When he was 19, Nguyen moved to the United States after securing a job at a fashion brand in Charlotte, North Carolina, and shifted his focus from fashion design to the visual arts. Nguyen began to cultivate an artistic practice centered around silk, to explore his personal and cultural identity. Silk has long been a symbol of wealth and beauty in Vietnam, and that status has shaped Vietnam's economics, policy and culture for thousands of years.
Inspired by the abstract expressionists and color field painting of the 1940s and 1950s like Clyfford Still, along with the later textile artists of the late 20th century on like Sheila Hicks and El Anatsui, Nguyen uses color and silk as a way of mapping memories to visually de- and re-construct his identity. Cutting, tearing, beating, sanding. Sewing, weaving, attaching, layering. A repeated process of destruction and reconstruction, Nguyen's practice has become the bond that has fashioned both of his cultures together, and a mode of both exploration and reflection.
Nguyen mindfully selects his natural silk and then, using specially mixed acrylic paint and chemicals, layers his creations onto canvas. "The paint is trapped inside," Nguyen shares. Informed by his training in fashion, Nguyen installs each piece sculpturally. His design and undulations throughout the installation process is an organic transformation and the resulting forms are not permanent, which he sees at correlating to the transformations of each of our identities over time. In the Vietnamese language, words that name colors are incredibly specific, infused with descriptive meanings and references, giving Nguyen an extraordinary perspective on the dynamism of color as a visual language in addition to an aesthetic expression. Colors become a language for memory and place, and Nguyen decisively constructs this language through the specific meanings and through precise combinations of colors. In his work, these colors become Nguyen's own to tell the story of his experience.
Kenny Nguyen graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Fashion Design from National University of Art and Architecture, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2010. He later graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in Charlotte, NC, in 2015. Nguyen's works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at Sejong Museum of Art, Czong Institue for Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; LaGrange Art Museum, GA; Florida State University Museum of Fine Art, FL; Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, TX; Capitol Hill Building, Washington D.C.; Katzen Art Center at the American University, Washington D.C.; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, CA; Art Market San Francisco; Seattle Art Fair; and Frieze LA, among others. In 2023, Nguyen opened Home/land, a solo exhibition, at Sugarlift Gallery in New York, NY. In 2016, Nguyen received an Excellence Asia Contemporary Young Artist Award from Sejong Museum of Art. He was also awarded Artist Residency Fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Chicago, IL; The Hambidge Center, GA; Vermont Studio Center, VT; Gil Artist Residency, Akureyri, Iceland; Château d'Orquevaux, Orquevaux, France; and AIR Guidiguada Gran Canaria, Spain. Kenny Nguyen lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina.