CHI L. NGUYỄN


PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS


   Where the Grass is Greener 3
   Where the Grass is Greener 2
   Where the Grass is Greener 1
   Letters to My Father

INSTALLATIONS


   Good Luck, Here Comes Infinity
   As Below, So Above 2
   As Below, So Above 1


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      Chi L. Nguyễn (Nguyễn Linh Chi, b.1992) is a visual artist based in Hanoi, Vietnam. Her works often explore liminal space and states between paradoxial notions and contradictions, the interrelation of nature - human - religion, and the intersection of art and ecology. Chi often works with drawing, painting, collage, installation, as well as interdisciplinary and research-based projects.

      Chi graduated Illustration from Camberwell College of Arts - University of the Arts London in 2013. In 2019, Chi participated in ‘Citizen Earth’, a year-long project bringing together artists and curators with a focus on environmental issues in Vietnam. She chose to examine the issue of religious waste in water spaces and ecological paradoxes in relation to faith. With that, Chi began exploring translucent and reflective materials, in particular mirrors and glass, through learning from an artisan in Hanoi Old Quarter. This project also ignited her interdisciplinary approach in which her resulting work was a mirror installation with sound design by artist Nhung Nguyễn.

      The paradoxes stemming from both material and topic later led her to investigate on the way mirrors and glass create immersive environments, unsettling states of the in-between, of contradictions. 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. 

      Since then, mirrors and glass have been the recurring materials in her works. With their inherent reflective properties, these materials also imbue oppositional/ paradoxical notions. 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 interior and the exterior, human and the more-than-human world.