Kenny Nguyen’s Artful Expression of Resistance Through Beauty

Kenny Nguyen’s Silk Tapestries: Visualizing Diaspora Through Material and Memory

In a technologically saturated world where digital fluency often overshadows tactile experience, artist Kenny Nguyen’s work emerges as a luminous anomaly. Utilizing hand-cut silk and acrylic paint, Nguyen creates tapestries that pulse with emotion, color, and memory—fluid monuments to a personal and cultural diaspora. His latest exhibition, Mother Tongue, showing at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, interrogates the relationship between language, identity, and migration through an aesthetic both modern and ancient.

A Practice Rooted in Tactility and Tradition

Nguyen’s process is deceptively simple but conceptually rich. He starts with white Vietnamese silk—diaphanous and reactive to even a breath of air—making incisions and tearing it into individual ribbons. These are then dipped in palettes of mixed acrylic hues and layered onto raw canvas. The resulting compositions are not fixed but mutable, shaped and reshaped by the shifting light and spatial conditions surrounding them. They conjure movement and depth, wavering like heat blurs or distant memories.

This process is not merely aesthetic; it is also symbolic. By destroying the silk’s original form and reassembling it piecemeal, Nguyen echoes the disruptions of migration and diaspora. The torn silk, steeped in pigments drawn from his Vietnamese lexicon—colors like khói lam chiều (“evening smoke blue”) and màu lúa chín (“ripe rice color”)—bridges personal memory with cultural resonance. His work becomes a kind of emotional cartography in pigment and cloth.

Born in rural Ben Tre Province, Vietnam, Nguyen moved to Ho Chi Minh City as a teenager to study fashion and later immigrated to the United States in 2010. Now living in Charlotte, North Carolina, he found in painting a language that transcended his initial struggles with English. Painting became more than expression; it became survival, translation, and communion.

Articulating Trauma Through Abstraction

A particularly moving aspect of Mother Tongue is Nguyen’s “White Noise” series, created to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. These pieces are tinted with a visual static that recalls black-and-white war footage—a childhood artifact of Nguyen’s in its own right. Rather than rendering literal representations of war, Nguyen captures the ghost-like textures and tonal frequencies of those broadcast remnants, hovering in the ambiguous transition between memory and mediated history.

Colors such as khaki, Payne’s gray, and bone white dominate this series, arranged in rhythmic vertical waves that glitch and pull like a disturbed signal. The subtle degradation and distortion in his silk panels evoke the war’s aftereffects not as fixed narratives, but as persistent, elusive impressions. In this way, Nguyen refuses the conventional pressure on diaspora artists to reenact trauma for viewer consumption. Instead, he offers a surface onto which viewers project and interpret, where memory and experience remain unresolved and open-ended.

Against the Politics of Performance

Nguyen’s work resists the performative expectations often imposed on artists of color. There is an implicit demand in many art institutions for artists from marginalized backgrounds to offer digestible, representative, or explanatory works that affirm preexisting narratives. For Asian American artists, this can mean being expected to embody the “model minority” or to provide stereotypical reflections on ancestral homeland traumas.

Nguyen actively subverts these dictates. His works are not acts of translation for a Western gaze but introspective constructions of individual hybridity. His quote, featured in a gallery video—“I have to ignore that I learned English. I have to ignore what I’ve learned and try to remember what it would be like if I speak in these colors in Vietnamese”—should be read not as a rejection of acquired selfhood but as an attempt to disengage from performative fluency and return to an internal visual vernacular.

Critically, this desire does not deny his hybrid identity; it emphasizes the multiplicity that defines it. His use of silk, a material loaded with Asian textile traditions, also speaks to the complexity of diasporic context. Rather than symbolizing a link to antiquity or “authentic” culture, silk for Nguyen references both his Vietnamese heritage and his early professional life in fashion design. It becomes a literal and figurative thread connecting geographies, industries, and temporalities.

Elegy and Presence in a Shifting Form

The tactile quality of Nguyen’s silk tapestries underscores their conceptual heft. Held in place with pins, the fabric seems tentatively affixed—both fragile and determined. This precarity mirrors the experience of diasporic life, in which identities are always provisional, contexts always changing.

In the gallery, these works exude a corporeal presence. Through swelling, wave-like contours and cumulative layers of material, they suggest the outline of an absent body or the echo of a moment long since passed. The tension between ephemerality and permanence infuses