My work explores the complex journey and navigation between multiple worlds and the constant negotiation of identity in a foreign land. Imagined Ricefields is an imagined map of a rural farming village I’ve drawn based on memory. It’s about my severed personal history as a migrant and the struggle of finding a home and a sense of belonging away from my native country. Installed in cold and snowy landscapes, I show the dislocation I felt moving to a different part of the world.Installed in a tree that’s falling over, it represents my disconnection with the land particularly with the flora. It’s a reminder of the typhoon that felled the century-old mango trees that destroyed my grandmother's ancestral house, right before I left the Philippines.

This piece explores the complex duality of technological advancement, inviting viewers to critically assess their relationship with technology. It portrays the media's gaze as a seductive escape for the masses — a powerful yet double-edged sword. While technology, particularly social media, can lead to unprecedented feelings of loneliness and isolation, it also compels participation through societal pressure. For those shaped by displacement and migration, this digital landscape can feel like quicksand — simultaneously offering connection and eroding a sense of belonging. Despite this, there exists an untainted space within each of us, where the simplicity of birdsong and starlight prevails. This piece encourages us to reconnect with and safeguard that pristine refuge in our minds.

Intergenerational dynamics shape my concept of home and domestic relationships. They reside within night prayers, between unopened moving boxes, encased in a white envelope, and handed down from mothers to daughters in my family. Such cyclical repetition brings with it familiarity, but also the uncanny–where the familiar becomes its opposite. This generational dialogue manifests in the juxtaposition of materials and symbols within my practice, constantly negotiating time and space. Drawing from objects that hold personal significance, including childhood clothing, red beans, and toys, I seek intersections between pain, tenderness, and hauntings perpetuated by domestic settings. Rematerializing and interpreting these objects, traditionally associated with innocence explores artmaking as a means for catharsis, which I represent through the presence of an egg. An egg exists as a symbol of fragility, where eggshells–the maternal encasement–become a leftover house through birth.

I aim to explore the debilitating and overlooked mental health issue of disordered eating among Chinese women. An expectation and standard of a thin and fragile body within both Chinese and the Chinese diaspora has resulted in persistent anxieties around eating. Upon scrolling through social media platforms such as Rednote and TikTok, it’s easy to see how significant thinness is as a marker of beauty and accomplishment. The pressure of remaining slender has shifted the connotations surrounding mealtime from being an opportunity for social connection and pleasure to an entity to avoid. The act of lifting one’s rice bowl up to their mouth has become an unsafe place, with fear of internal and external judgment. The stress one feels after finishing their food can be so relentless it may be easier to fabricate a false sense of fullness rather than to feel the weight of shame and panic.

My project will display a visualization of the methods that Chinese women go through to restrain themselves from eating. I aim to create a series of dinnerware, inspired by the popular Mun Shou pattern, often seen in both restaurants and homes. Bowls, plates, serving dishes, and spoons with the phrase ‘萬壽無疆’ (boundless longevity) will be changed to read 我吃饱了 (I am full) to convey the message of restrictive eating patterns as a result from mental health challenges surrounding food consumption. This series of dinnerware with anxiety-induced affirmations will serve as a bleak reminder of Chinese women’s efforts to persuade themselves to stop eating.

This self-portrait focused on the overwhelming isolation and psychological pain of living with multiple co-morbid mental illnesses and post-traumatic stress disorder. The figure’s cloak employs embroidery techniques that capture my recurring harmful thoughts and self-talk repeated in my journals.

This work is a portrait of my mother, my three brothers and myself. It was made to honour her sacrifices, her labour, and her complex cultural expressions of love investigating the nuances between the immigrant, first generational and second generational identities.

This reflective piece engages the preservation of diasporic memory through objects, tied to memories as a child of eating my grandfather’s bean curd soup. Dried bean curd, made solid through the process of bronze casting, feels heavy and solid in my hands. The transformation from natural casting processes represents the physical and metaphorical solidification of early memories connected to culture and tradition, speaking to the passing down of intergenerational knowledge, the materiality of love, and familial care. The accompanying sound piece documents the process of my yé-yé (爷爷, grandfather) teaching me how to make his bean curd soup, a comforting Chinese dish steeped in my childhood memories. The polyrhythmic beat was recorded with a contact mic, sampled from the sounds of liquid contents sloshing around in my stomach. Listening closely, you may be able to hear the cracking, soaking, and rubbing of the bean curd; the chopping of mushrooms and meat; the soup boiling, slurping, eating, and the voices of my grandfather and me.

In my artistic journey, I am deeply drawn to the theme of navigating dual+ realities, particularly within the context of Asian mental health. This exploration stems from a profound curiosity about how individuals reconcile their identities amidst conflicting internal and external pressures, and the profound impact of these struggles on their well-being.

Being adopted from Hunan China and growing up in Vancouver and now Toronto, I have witnessed firsthand the intricate interplay between personal identity and societal expectations. My own struggle with grappling with my own cultural heritage/identity often coexists with the complexities of modern Western white influences, creating a tension that can be both empowering and confining. Through my art, I seek to unravel these complexities, shedding light on the silent struggles and resilience within my own Chinese adoptee identity.

My work delves into the duality of my internal world and external world - how they can be both liberating and imprisoning. The internal dialogue, influenced by upbringing and social norms, often manifests as an intricate dance between acceptance and defiance, belonging and alienation. These dynamics profoundly shape my mental health experiences, sometimes exacerbating feelings of isolation or inadequacy.

In a series of works, Nguyen explores the topics of “Intersectionality”, “Cultural Narratives and Representation”, and “Art and Mental Health”. By conceptualizing the image of a porcelain vase into a portrait of a person, the imagery of porcelain in fragments, with broken lines, and repairs using twine, become the fragments of a person who has been broken and reassembled. The perceived experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora in Canada is one that is synonymous with images of trauma and violence. The symbol of porcelain, an object that is both considered beautiful and exotic as well as commonplace, parallels the perception and treatment of southeast asian women in the West. She is an object of beauty as well as a site of violence in her objectification.

What does healing look like for this human-object?

The use of plastic twine (a household material commonly found in Vietnamese homes meant for fastening banana leaves in cultural cooking) in these works has been both a medium and a visual signifier for healing, repair, reassemblage, migration, and the formation of something new.

As a racialized artist of the Vietnamese diaspora, Nguyen learned about her culture second-hand from my refugee family and from North American sources. Self-tokenization has been used as a tool for social survival and self-discovery while also being a vessel for self-betrayal and self-objectification. Although Ornamentalism's “object turned person” is still peri-human- a racialized Other in Canadian society, Nguyen believes that it is a figure worth studying and conceptualizing in the artwork in an attempt to learn more about what it means to be a living yet dead “person-thing”.

In Letters to Future Love, Ayu and Vridhhi C. explore, through text, image, and sound, the emotional, psychological, and spiritual reckoning of falling in future love. In the prismatic multiplicities of space-time, Ayu and Vridhhi articulate the confluences of traumatic memories, past and future tense. As Ayu composes the letters, they are sent to Vridhhi, who translates the text into images, drawing upon her own life experiences. Through this collaboration, the artists reach one another, extending this invitation outwards, welcoming others to explore the inner workings of their hearts. At times, this reach is intercultural, interpolitical, and interfeminist. Yet, in the interweaving of diverse histories and cosmologies, uncanny emotional and mental health knowledges resonate and materialize. Ayu and Vridhhi bring to this endeavor creative investigations of intergenerational trauma, complex PTSD, depression, suicide, emotional and spiritual resilience, care rituals, and commemoration.

Exploring the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on human connection, Social Distancing delves into both the psychological and physical dimensions of our altered social landscape. Comprised of two wheelchairs featuring sleek mild steel frames, the installation suspends two tennis balls between them, initially set to the distance mandated by social distancing policies. This interactive piece invites viewers to engage with the chairs, adjusting their proximity and thereby fostering intimate interactions. As the chairs draw closer, the large tennis ball spheres collide and sway, symbolizing the concept of physical closeness amidst a time of necessary distance.

Spills II explores the transformation of memory through personal, familial, and cultural rituals. The piece consists of wax-encased photo transparencies arranged on a shelf wrapped in brown packing paper. The wax, melted ceremonial detritus, obscures large portions of each transparency—family photos—leaving only glimpses of the content below. The act of obfuscation speaks to the erosion of memory over time and the challenges of inherited histories.

The use of non-archival materials, such as brown packing paper, introduces an element of imperfection. It alludes to the inadequacies inherent in the ways we attempt to preserve the past, particularly in the context of disrupted genealogies. The meticulous folding and taping of the material, however, suggests deep care and consideration in the face of limited resources. The photos, which are laid face up at waist height, encourage viewers to bow slightly in order to examine them. This physical engagement with the piece echoes a gesture of reverence and enfolds the viewer-audience into a participatory ritual.

Spills II challenges us to consider our interactions with our personal and collective histories. It suggests that our actions, intentional or otherwise, hold the possibility of forging new relationships with the narratives we've inherited—that we are active agents in the renewal and transformation of the past.