Thương / Nhớ
Phượng-Duyên Hải Nguyễn
Photo credit Lindsey Leahy.
Thương / Nhớ
Vietnamese, verbs: Loving / Remembering
is a home being (re)built from deceptively flimsy-looking forms, fueled by fragmented memories.
is a home being (re)constructed from the outlines of apartment complexes, schools, and markets that populate my homeland.
is a home being sewn together because sewing is a caring, tender, healing act.
Photo credit Sarah Cramer Shields
Phượng-Duyên Hải Nguyễn (she/they) is a Vietnamese-American multidisciplinary artist based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Born in Vietnam and moved to the US as a teenager, Nguyễn’s experiences and perspective as an immigrant inform and enrich her work. She sews threadbare, abstract structures and forms. To Nguyễn, abstraction is a tool to process and articulate - a formal construct upon which she restructures her stories. It is an act of obscuring the painful details, distilling the most beautiful aspects, and transforming them into tangible objects.
She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2022 and her BA from the University of Virginia in 2015.