TIA-THUY NGUYEN: BURDENING DREAM
Almine Rech Monaco is pleased to announce 'Burdening Dream', Tia-Thuy Nguyen's second solo exhibition.
December 10, 2024 – March 1, 2025
Tia-Thuy Nguyen has focused much of her time on the subject of light. Having specialized in painting techniques during her studies at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, the artist then took her PhD in Fine Arts in Ukraine. In 'Burdening Dream', with new watercolor paintings and quartz works on canvas, she has closely followed Vietnamese traditions and rituals including crafting mulberry paper, which is a traditional material used in Asian art — one that is light and fragile in its own right, and which needs to be treated with a certain delicacy. By combining this with quartz and glass beads — heavier materials that are attached by hand with meticulous attention to detail — Nguyen creates watercolor paintings studded with stones, which she describes as "evaporating to form sparkling clouds".
Light is inseparable from the sky, from the clouds. Blistering rays of sun burning in space, filtering through the atmosphere. Uncertainty sometimes hovers above the horizon. In this vein of not knowing what the sky may bring, she describes a memory of her father: "I grew up with my father who was a pilot in the Air Force. I liked growing up with all of his stories about the clouds and rain. He always said that when he would take off into the sky, he wondered what might happen through his window. He said that behind that cloud, there could be an enemy, there could be a friend, or it could just be the beautiful day".
In the series of mulberry paper artworks, she focuses on light dancing in the atmosphere. Take, for example, Tension so intense (2024) in which a vibrant sky is streaked with clouds that billow as moments of multicolour. The yellow of the atmosphere gives way to a mist of the warmest orange, which in turn rubs up against fresh tones of minty green and azure blue. The paper responds to the wetness of the paint with its own gentle movement, rising to kiss the watery pigment, and as it does, the stones of quartz and cullet glint and sparkle in acknowledgment. In another work, Just own the night (2024) the scene is even sparser, clouds of the palest baby blue offset with stones that deepen into shades of cyan and indigo. Between the clouds there is calm, space to breathe, a cosmos beyond all this in which to move.
Perhaps we can all relate to feeling this way, in a world where the upward curve towards equitableness seems to be plummeting — where, at times, the cloud cover seems too dense to decipher whether or not there might be another way through, or if the sun is still shining on the other side. If there is still light at the end of the tunnel.
— Louisa Elderton, writer and editor based in Berlin