Kenny Nguyen: Home/land

Home/land was Kenny Nguyen's first solo exhibition with Sugarlift, built around his largest work to date. He covered the gallery's back wall with a single canvas, 12 by 31 feet before installation, and hand-sculpted it into an undulating gradient of painted silk, a light-catching topography of drapes and folds. Like all of his work, it can never be installed the same way twice. The show opened with a reception on February 16, 2023.

Nguyen's work is painting, textile and sculpture at once. In the studio he cuts silk into long strips, presses them into marbled paint and collages them one by one onto canvas, but a piece is only finished once it is on the wall. Born and raised in Vietnam, he moved with his family to North Carolina in 2010, at 19, and came to silk through a background in fashion design. Cutting up a fabric so rich in cultural meaning is itself a transgressive act, and its transformation mirrors his own.

The installation balanced seeming contradictions (painting and sculpture, structured and pliable, permanent and transient) that echo the pairs Nguyen lives between: Vietnamese and American, resident and immigrant, home and land. In his artist statement he writes, "Home and homeland are the most hybrid and complex forms in Vietnamese culture. They have become an intra-verse in which memories of family, history, culture, politics, religion are densely interwoven." He returned to Sugarlift at the end of the year with Chạm: Mapping Identity, where the installation hung again as Homeland.