Open Studio: Diane Severin Nguyen and Thuy Tien

Reception: Friday, April 4th, 6-8pm

On view through April 20th, 2025

Everyday, 10 am - 6 pm

6/44/11 To Ngoc Van, Tay Ho, Hanoi

We are pleased to announce that Diane Severin Nguyen and Thuy Tien's open studio will begin on April 4th, 2025. The open studio follows their residency at VAC Hanoi from January to March 2025.

Time, transformation, and contradiction are the common themes that interest Diane and Thuy Tien. By manipulating everyday objects and altering given environments, Diane stages uncanny, ephemeral situations and encapsulates their transitory moments into photography and moving images. For the artist, the act of image-making becomes a conceptual instrument to question desire, trauma, and history. Tien's practice starts with the material and its repurposing from familiarity into estrangement. Her sculptural works often take on anthropomorphic evocation rooted in the material's historical, social, and cultural dimensions. Through structural and material intervention, the artist constructs symbolic forms related to her personal memories and experiences to conjure alternative narratives beyond the surface.

Diane Severin Nguyen's open studio, Spring Snow , features her work-in-progress photography and a two-channel video installation that explores the desire for innocence, simultaneous realities, and the construction of purity. Snow in a tropical jungle, green leaves, yellow pomelos, and red dragon fruits covered in snowy white, underlying this surreal dreamscape, are seemingly random yet conspicuous dates, such as Wednesday, April 30; Saturday, August 8; Monday, December 22. Little girls' used outfits in haute-couture fashion occupy the adjacent frame, showing close-ups of one dress at a time, rotating in an eternal loop. Juxtaposing the dreamy scenery with used dresses absent of bodies, the video work plays a soundtrack mixing Western and Vietnamese pop songs with intermittent silence, rendering situations where one experiences a circular time of selective memories and yet seeks to transcend from within and beyond.

Thuy Tien's Mưa Bóng Mây (Sunshower) explores the tension between memory and material through transformed domestic elements. The open studio takes its name from the Vietnamese term for rain falling through sunlight - fleeting emotions and half-remembered memories. Central to the works are skeletal reconstructions of Tali wood furniture - a sense of familial pride and form of colonial legacy, now warped into haunting forms and delicate material, an empty decaying carrier structure turning into melted frame whispers of erasure. Hidden behind a cabinet, a MIDI version of a 2000s Vietnamese pop melody, Uoc gi (I Wish) , loops endlessly fraying like a fading memory stuck in its chorus. Here, Thuy Tien toys with materials of visceral contrast - the density of Tali wood against sugar's slow dissolution, spandex stretched over rigid frames - to trace how domestic spaces preserve both tenderness and pressure.

Invited by Thuy Tien, the guest artist Wanwen's works take up the residency's 5th Floor. Repurposing wood beams from Tien's disassembled furniture as the hanging structure, Wanwen installs four of her most recent painting series along the wall and windows, referring to the adaptation, modification, and maintenance of the mahjong house interior.

About the artist

Diane Severin Nguyen works with photography, video, and installation. Through material and sculptural experimentations, Nguyen approaches the photographic moment as one of transformation. The artist is particularly interested in exceeding photography as a mode of documentation and engages with it instead as a set of conditions shaped by desire and speculation. Her video work narrativizes these concerns by examining the histories of power, victimhood, and forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image-making. She has displayed her work internationally in places like SculptureCenter, The Renaissance Society, the Rockbund Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Schinkel Pavilion, Jeu du Paume, the Hammer Museum, and many others. Her films have been screened at festivals such as the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Berlinale. Nguyen is a recent recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim fellowship and lives and works in New York.

Thuy Tien is an artist based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Hanoi, Vietnam. Tien's artistic practice revolves around transforming personal and collective memories, examining how they are distorted, translated, and reconstructed over time. Her recent works explore the concept of home and disciplines, often portraying fragmented and ambiguous impressions of domestic objects and how their relationships manifest within and beyond ordinary everyday life. Whether through objects, installations, photography, or situations, her practice often takes on the appearance of accidental occurrences or their remnants, leaving hints and a sense of disorientation in the spaces she engages with.

Trained in traditional silk painting and digital art, Zhang Wanwen (b.1994) currently lives and works as a multidisciplinary artist between Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and her hometown, Mount. Emei, in Szechuan province, China. Zhang's research demonstrates a continuous interest in domesticity, perception, and femininity to manifest curiosity in fandom and crafts. Her practice involves a multitude of spatial encounters and circumstances. Through nuanced gestures expressed in painting, drawing, calligraphy, animation, comic books, film, and sound, she reconstructs fragments and sequences nonlinearly with materials drawn from non-hierarchical sources. Zhang's work serves as a playground for an intersectional synesthesia experience. In her recent works, she examines the authority, accessibility, and authenticity of memories and the process of image-making in the era of simulacra. Thuy Tien and Wanwen have been collaborating since 2024.