Tammy Nguyen: The Gale

NCA | Nichido Contemporary Art

Finished

Artists

Tammy Nguyen

Referencing the style of the decorated manuscripts, the new series of paintings in this exhibition represent, in Nguyen's words, "a world of Catholicism swallowed by the tropics." The eleven works in total are cut from scenes or fragments of scenes that appear in the book "Decorated Manuscripts: The World's Most Famous Decorated Manuscripts from 400 to 1600," which contains 167 medieval decorated manuscripts. Taking a series of Catholicism narratives as her point of departure, "Storm" represents a world of religious motifs that are consumed by the forces of nature and geopolitical warfare. Examining how Catholicism is rooted in various aspects of daily life in the global south, particularly in her parents' native Vietnam, Nguyen sees this proselytization as "a colonial campaign powerful enough to withstand not only nature but also contemporary geopolitical struggles."

Nguyen also draws inspiration from the interdependence of craft and mythology in traditional decorative manuscripts. Through the transmission of breath, the manuscript craftsman re-activates the glue that glues the gold together, whose life force is said to transfer the Holy Spirit into the text and images, making these religious compositions even more sacred. Although the surface of the manuscript is completely flat, the angles of illumination make the metal shards appear three-dimensional, as if the gold were floating on the page. Here, the physically proven exists within a mythic framework, and the clash between technique and subject matter in Nguyen's work creates a nice tension. The surfaces of her paintings are also flat, with figures and foregrounds oscillating between one another. In the lush, dense compositions, narrative structures and problems caused by the entanglement of subject and environment intertwine, revealing traces of gold that emphasize the power of nature, colonialism, and Catholicism.

Throughout the series, Nguyen uses "wind" as a conceptual pathway to explore composition through mark-making and contouring, and constructs landscapes using natural phenomena as a tool to understand the interaction of objects. Ancient trees were also sustained by wind over time, and that nature, like the Bible, is a sublime force is central to Nguyen's recent research themes. In her paintings, Nguyen depicts man-made winds with flocks of helicopters heading westward and storms with red maritime flags heading eastward. The winds of geopolitical warfare and climate change seem to clash against a backdrop of Catholic bibles and ancient trees, solidifying the ground as they adapt to the turmoil of man and nature throughout history.

Schedule

Sep 2 (Fri) 2022-Oct 15 (Sat) 2022