PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS
PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS
INSTALLATIONS
Chi L. Nguyễn (Nguyễn Linh Chi, b. 1992) is a visual artist based in Hanoi, Vietnam. Her works often explore space and states between contradictions, the interrelation of nature - human - religion, and materials from her family archives. Chi works across drawing, painting, installation, interdisciplinary and research-based projects.
Chi graduated in Illustration from Camberwell College of Arts - University of the Arts London. Her background, rooted in a family of sculptors, painters, and writers in Hanoi, naturally led to her affinity for visual arts that took inspirations from literature. Her drawing and collage series The New Kiều, inspired from ‘The Tale of Kiều‘ was awarded in Goethe-Institut Hanoi’s ‘Das Mädchen K/ The Girl Kieu’ Picture Shorts Competition 2019.
In 2019, Chi participated in ‘Citizen Earth’, a year-long project with a focus on environmental issues in Vietnam. She investigated the issue of religious waste in public water spaces and ecological paradoxes in relation to faith. With that, Chi began exploring reflective materials (mirrors and glass), through learning mirror painting from an artisan in Hanoi Old Quarter. This project also ignited her interdisciplinary approach in which Lakes was not only a mirror installation, but also a collaboration with sound artist Nhung Nguyễn.
During 2021-2022, she then brought mirrors to stage installation, expanding the possibilities of reflective materials in relation to space and audiences through a dance-theater project titled The Room 1 supported by Goethe-Institut Hanoi. Later in 2022, Chi furthered her research on traditional religious mirror & glass painting in Southern Vietnam through her residency and public presentation-talk at Sàn Art, then finalized and showcased her mirror diptych Double Seeing during her ‘Water Ecologies’ residency at LIA Leipzig International Art Program in 2024. Additionally, her drawing series on translucent rice papers Letters to My Father was awarded the Dogma Prize 2023, one of the main contemporary art prizes in Vietnam.
Since then, translucent materials such as rice paper, mirrors and glass have often recurred in her works due to their oppositional/ paradoxical qualities. It is the way they coexist with real space yet impenetrable, and how their double side-ness signifies liminality, constructing thresholds to unlearn reversed perspectives, challenge visual perception, emphasizing the complex relations between self and others, the inner and the outer, human and the more-than-human worlds.
CV