Vân-Nhi Nguyễn is an artist working across photography, assemblage, and collages based in Hanoi. Her practice explores how contemporary life is shaped by memory and unresolved histories. Returning to questions of personal, familial, and collective remembrance, she examines themes of identity, intimacy, motherhood, and the tensions between cultural tradition and modern life through a distinctly Vietnamese lens. Through staged domestic scenes and collages assembled from stock imagery alongside her own photographs, she creates layered, sculptural images that move between careful construction and improvisation.

Most recently, in Galerie Quynh’s group exhibition 𝑇ℎ𝑎̆́𝑚 𝐿𝑎̣𝑖 (2026), curated by Anh Dao Ha, she turned her attention to female friendship and the quiet intimacies through which young Vietnamese women navigate cultural inheritance and contemporary life. 

Nguyễn has been presented at Objectif Centre for Photography & Film, Hong Kong International Photography Festival, Peckham Copeland, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Matca Space for Photography, amongst others. She has also received funding from the likes of Aperture Foundation, Pro Helvetia foundation, V&A Museum, PhMuseum, to name a few. Her work has been published in various publications such as Aperture magazine, It’s Nice That, British Journal of Photography, Le Monde Magazine, etc. Her work is part of the collections of The Museum of Modern Art.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I’m Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, an artist working across photography, assemblage, and collages based in Hanoi, Vietnam. I didn’t have my start in photography up until a bit after Covid, but my obsession with images and playing with it has always been a part of my life as a child, as my family didn’t have a TV until late 2000s so I didn’t really take to cinema or tv shows as much as images that I can cut up and look at in newspapers or books around the house, and photographs that my parents. The older I get the more I gravitate towards photography as a medium because simply it was beautiful and deceptive to me at the time – it doesn’t tell you the truth but to give you a direction to feel about a certain topics, through the description or direction of how a photograph is orchestrated, which is not a new thing but to a 17 year old, it was interesting enough to see it in not just commercial photography but to eventually realize it is almost in journalism or documentary, things that supposedly “truthful”.

Growing up in Vietnam has taught me the meaning of “double speak”, trying to survive in a place where freedom of speech is constricting, and photography has always been to document the truth, to whatever that extent is, and of service to journalism. I thought I wanted to create images that are purely fictional, based-on-a-memory-of-a-memory, or a distant memory or even gossip, but take the shape of the documentarian photograph.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

My practice explores how contemporary life is shaped by memory and unresolved histories. Returning to questions of personal, familial, and collective remembrance, I examine themes of intimacy, motherhood, and the tensions between cultural tradition and modern life through staged domestic scenes and collages assembled from stock imagery alongside my own photographs.

My work unfolds a continuous body rather than projects, tracing the relationship between personal and familial memory, and the political and infrastructural transformation of Vietnam, specifically Hanoi and its youth culture under an administration prioritizing rapid economic growth; a process that has included the demolition of historical buildings for corporate development, the displacement of residents through land reclamation for private developers, increased policing of marginalized communities, and reduced attention to public education and cultural preservation. Returning to Hanoi only after 3 years in college, during COVID, I found the city I grew up in largely transformed, as with my family. Confused and disoriented, I turned to my family archive to find navigation as I felt like I had completely lost my memories of what this place is or how had my family changed – photographs of my parents from the 1960s and 70s – as a way of reconnecting with a place in flux. Working in the tone of a familial photo album, I deliberately blur certain binaries: masculine and feminine, fiction and reality, the presentable and the private, being and performing. I’m interested in a kind of double consciousness that Vietnamese people, and Vietnamese women in particular, have often had to navigate – an inner life held separate from an outer one calibrated for visibility, a pattern I trace across generations: from refugees in the 1970s sending home photographs that projected ease rather than hardship, to my mother’s negotiation of Confucian tradition and its limits, to my friends and I working through inherited expectations around womanhood. My family becomes a lens through which to consider broader shifts in Vietnamese society, shaped by many of the same institutional forces reshaping the city itself. At the same time, the work isn’t only about rupture; in images of women and girls together, in quiet domestic gestures and everyday forms of solidarity, I find something closer to resilience: small spaces of mutual recognition that persist even at the margins of systems not built with them in mind.

What is your creative process like? Do you follow a routine or work spontaneously?

My creative process is not linear, and I don’t work in a project based manner. Instead I follow my own thesis that guides me through what I want to make for my next image, and from the next image I can expand on whether it is appropriate to use collage or create something else based on this obsession with image and text that I have. There is an obsession that I have with images, despite its saturation in the modern age, which for me only increasae my interest in them as a kind of surface for information retention, whether it is propaganda, archival or whatever else. This expansion has made me question of its materiality and in return, I create photographs that bear the form of traditional journalism and documentary, yet completely staged, “fake”, imaginative scenes of a home that reflective of the culture of where I live. Usually this process takes month to create a single photograph, as for me it is more important to develop a relationship between me and the person, the space and the objects that are being photographed, as everything for me is based on the memories and sentimentality of it, rather than the technical aspects.

Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

I recently ventured into sculpture/ assemblage to create “47 Nguyễn Tuân”, graduating from my same as always thesis of image making, its possibilies and its role in familial and political documentation. 47 Nguyễn Tuân is an installation piece comprises of 3 panels, that sits somewhere between assemblage and collage – built from materials salvaged from construction sites and domestic interiors: corrugated roofing metal sheets, wooden boards, gates, wallpaper, painted construction plywood. I wanted the structure itself to carry an improvised, unfinished feeling, as though it were still being built or already falling apart. These aren’t neutral materials to me. They’re pulled from the same demolition sites where historical buildings and old neighborhoods are being torn down to make way for corporate towers, high rises, and golf courses backed by foreign investment — the physical residue of a city rebuilding itself over the people who lived in it. I wanted the structure to carry that improvised, half-built, half-erased feeling: a house that could be under construction or already being dismantled, standing in for a Hanoi caught in the same tension.

Over this constructed surface, I layer family photographs – some found, some my own, some heavily altered – alongside internet-sourced footage and screenshots. The images sit on top of the material the way memory sits on top of a place: never quite settled, always slightly displaced. I think of interiors as something that can be flipped inside out, and of memory itself as something structured less by lived experience than by mass media, by the images we’ve absorbed without noticing. That’s where the idea of “prosthetic memory” comes in – the sense that a mediated image can trigger the feeling of having seen something before, even when it isn’t yours. Real and fake stop being opposites and start being intertwined, folded into each other until the distinction stops mattering.

I collaborated with filmmaker/video artist Nguyen Duy Anh on this piece. He produced a video work, Biển cười (Smiling Sea), which is embedded inside the house sculpture that is 47 Nguyễn Tuân. His piece uses found images of women – moving from birth through adulthood, marriage, childbirth – looped and fed back through AI processing until the images begin to distort, layer, and dissolve into something unrecognizable. To watch Biển cười, the viewer has to physically stick their head into a hole at the threshold between the two works, almost like peering into the private quarters of a house – an act that’s a little intrusive, a little voyeuristic, mimicking how we look into other people’s domestic lives.

What happens when the two works are shown together is that they stop being separate objects. My structure gives Nguyen Duy Anh’s video a body, a domestic architecture to inhabit; his video gives my structure an interior to its “exteriorized domestic” life, a looping, degrading memory running inside its walls. The longer you engage with either piece, the more that memory seems to fade and reality seems to shift – the images in my collage and the footage in his video both moving toward the same kind of dissolution.

Together, the two works become an experience rather than two separate objects: they ask whoever encounters them to consider that identity – personal, familial, public- isn’t something fixed we simply have, but something constructed and reconstructed continuously through the narratives, images, and inherited memories we live inside of.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

One of the greatest challenge as an artist in Vietnam has always been about how we always have to create a double meaning of our work – what your work truly means and how it is presented to the permit officer. It can mean anything from overcomplicating the subject to the abstracts, or oversimplifying it to its forms and feelings, communicating through visuals and nuances rather than texts and writings. To most of the outsiders art viewers, as they come across the work and its oversimplified/ almost superficial meanigns that are often presented as part of curving our restrictions on speech liberty, artists here are often undermined. However to me, this is a kind of bravery to show and tell that is not often seen in international art scenes, especially in photography/ lens-based practice as it is often regarded as nothing more than a device for news deliverance/ information retainers.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

I’m very interested in continuing the assemblage but moving into a more feminine space. However, photography will always be at the heart of my work and expanding on it is also extremely important to my work as a photographer and artist.

I have also been hosting several Reading Rooms, where I host small talks on photobooks that I bought during my travels, and conversations around photography and its possibilities, which has been very fruitful for not just my practice but also to engage with the art scene in Hanoi. The nature of the art scene in Vietnam has always been extremely grassroot, due to the system and government, so these gatherings become a space where people can exchange their ideas and thoughts through the accessibility of the photobooks.

Text and photo courtesy of Vân-Nhi Nguyễn

Website: https://vannhinguyen.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vnnhi/