Kenny Nguyen (b. 1990, Ben Tre Province, Vietnam) creates expansive, dimensional, mixed-media paintings that center on ideas of cultural identity, displacement and integration.
Nguyen grew up on a coconut farm in a rural area near the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. Despite having an established career in fashion design, he decided to join his family when they moved to the United States in 2010.
Acclimating to an American way of life proved uneasy at first, especially with a language barrier that intensified feelings of alienation and isolation. Nguyen turned to artmaking as a coping mechanism and as a means to express himself in a more universal language. The transition from design to art was a natural one and in 2015 Nguyen earned a BFA in painting from the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and subsequently established a studio in Charlotte.
Drawing from his experience working with textiles, in particular, silk, a culturally significant material in Vietnam, Nguyen developed a distinctive technique to produce sensual, three-dimensional works that he describes as “deconstructed paintings.”
He begins by tearing swaths of silk fabric into hundreds of strips that he dips in acrylic paint and adheres to raw canvas. Methodically, almost meditatively, he repeats the process—tearing, painting, sanding, sewing, weaving, attaching, layering—until he has a structured but malleable medium, which he shapes into undulating, sculpted forms.
Nguyen’s paintings are often affixed to the wall with pushpins, allowing him the flexibility to rehang or adjust the composition as desired. The works can be stretched flat like a traditional canvas or gently draped, folded and creased into animated structures that unfurl along the wall and pool at the floor. Each installation is unique.
In some ways, Nguyen’s approach of deconstruction and reconstruction is akin to the experience of growing into his identity as Vietnamese American and as an artist. His use of silk, which remains the primary material in his practice, has evolved alongside him. Where he once chose it for its splendor and sense of familiarity, through a rigorous process of transformation, it now holds greater meaning for the artist: “For me, silk has become the connector tying both cultures together.”
Nguyen 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.
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.
Syncretism and Silk: Finding Cao Đài in Contemporary Art
by Pamela N. Corey
Color is both forceful and elusive in the otherworldly environment created by Kenny Nguyen. In a large-scale tapestry-like installation crafted from silk and paint, vivid swathes of crimson and cerulean traverse the wall like a choreography of fire and water. The colors seem to stretch beyond their material confines, consuming our vision from across the room, collapsing a sense of distance between our bodies and the chromatic undulations on the wall. Yet, color is more peripheral in the suspended forms that create an architecture through which one must navigate the gallery space. On these hollow columns of woven silk strips, color appears to dissolve into texture. Within the individual squares of the tight weave, earthen hues emerge from infinite striations of colors and their shades and tints, producing complex gridded surfaces that seem to oscillate the longer you look at them.
Kenny Nguyen: The Divine Eye demonstrates the artist’s ongoing interest in exploring the plasticity and coloristic possibilities of silk, methods that he has developed through his training in fashion design and the visual arts. For Nguyen, the tapestry-like forms crafted from hand-torn strips of silk soaked in bands of acrylic paint speak to the more abstract but deeply personal issues of cultural identity, displacement, and heritage that he has navigated through the language of art. For this body of work, these questions are grounded in the artist’s familial connections to Cao Đài, a syncretic religion established in the southern region of Vietnam in the early twentieth century, the period of high colonialism in French Indochina and the concurrent fomentation of nationalist movements. Through tacit understanding of religious practice, committed inquiry to questions of the self, and his own field research in southern Vietnam, Cao Đài features in Nguyen’s mixed-media paintings and sculptures in subtle ways, whether through iconography or analogy.
Nguyen takes inspiration from the Cao Đài Holy See, or Great Temple, in Tây Ninh, Vietnam, considered the first and most important temple for the religion. Today the temple draws worshippers and tourists alike for its vibrant and eclectic aesthetic, featuring both sacred and secular symbolism illustrating the religion’s absorption of Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and Christian tenets and sages. The artist’s choice to suspend the columns creates cathedrals whose cavernous, towering spaces were meant to create an impression of heaven on earth. Fixed to the ceiling and not to the ground, each column holds the potential of movement, with the tightly woven armature descending into a fringe of fabric, drawing comparison with the cylindrical forms of Buddhist victory banners or Tibetan prayer wheels, which find iterations in blue (Daoism), yellow (Buddhism), and red (Confusionism) in the Cao Đài Holy See. The columns’ patterning also conjure images of locality and environment suggestive for those familiar with the Vietnamese South, such as woven rattan and grass mats and implements, the rough patterning of coconut trees abundant in the artist’s hometown of Bến Tre in the Mekong Delta, or the ornate scales of the ceramic dragons who writhe around temple columns.
In Cao Đài iconography the left eye is perhaps the most unique and pervasive symbol, representing the all-seeing eye or the divine eye of God, but Nguyen employs metaphors of vision in a different way for this body of work. He emphasizes the power of the unseen and the private as fundamental to one’s sense of self and spiritual being, creating a separate space in the exhibition which can be likened to a religious sanctuary. Here the polychromy of the larger room gives way to the intimacy of darkness and grayscale. The departure from color to its absence is not so much division as unity for the artist, like the harmony of the seen and the unseen, or the material and the void, for Cao Đài and other cultural philosophies not only in Asia but also for the artist’s understanding of the constitution of identity.
In Janet Hoskin’s book The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (2015), a significant inspiration for this body of work, she describes the nature of Cao Đài’s syncretism as an explicit and self-critical process, always in formation, rather than as implicit understanding. This notion of syncretism undergirds Nguyen’s own interests in culture and identity, which manifest in his choice of materials and methods, developed from his own search for openness and unity among seemingly discrepant elements and influences. Whether these might be silk painting and sculptural construction, or Cao Đài and contemporary African art, Kenny Nguyen: The Divine Eye asks us to look for those unexpected moments of unity.
Pamela Nguyen Corey is an associate professor of art history at Fulbright University in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. Prior to joining Fulbright University Vietnam in 2021, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art & Archaeology department at SOAS University of London. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and the Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021), and guest co-editor of “Voice as Form,” a special issue of Oxford Art Journal (2020).
