Kenny Nguyen: Chạm: Mapping Identity

Chạm: Mapping Identity was Kenny Nguyen's second solo exhibition with Sugarlift, after Home/land earlier in 2023. It followed his first trip back to Vietnam since he emigrated to the United States more than a decade before. He found his former home transformed by the rapid pace of globalization, development and cultural change, and the visit unsettled his own sense of identity. The new work set out to capture the challenges of reclaiming roots that had themselves been transformed.

The show was staged as a conversation between two walls. On the east wall hung Homeland, the large-scale silk installation from Home/land earlier that year, made in anticipation of his return, with memories of his childhood in Vietnam surfacing in its folds. Directly opposite, on the west wall, hung the Encounter Series, made in response to the trip. Old and new, memory and present-day reality faced each other across the room. The Vietnamese word chạm means touch, engrave and encounter, and the exhibition suggested that embracing change can deepen a connection to one's roots.

Every work in the show was hand-cut silk, acrylic and canvas, mounted on the wall. Nguyen breaks the silk down into strips, dips each piece in acrylic paint and adheres it to raw canvas, layering and molding the material so that no two installations ever look the same. For him, silk stands for the transient nature of culture and selfhood, as strong and resilient as it is graceful, and its passage from fabric to sculpture mirrors his own evolution. Nguyen is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.