(Brooklyn, NY) NARS Foundation is pleased to present Architectures of Intimacy, an exhibition featuring works by Tra My Nguyễn, Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Z.T. Nguyễn, Vy Trịnh, and Hạ-Lan Văn. The exhibition examines the material logic of Vietnamese spaces, where objects shift between roles, blending the practical with the poetic. Through sculpture, photography, video, and mixed media, these artists explore how everyday materials shape memory, care, and transformation.
Taking its name from Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s concept of architecturesofintimacy, the exhibition highlights how Vietnamese spaces are built on improvisation, humor, and adaptability. Tu’s concept, which examines the entanglement of space, intimacy, and labor within diasporic and domestic contexts, provides a framework for understanding how personal and collective memory are shaped through material life. A motor wire becomes a chandelier, a sheet of reclaimed wood becomes a modular pillar carved into creature-like form, and objects take on new lives without losing their history.
Vy Trịnh’s Chandelier(single)is composed of motor electrical wire sourced from a motor accessories market in Saigon, delicately wrapped with metallic ribbons from the city’s garment market. Though it emits no actual light, the piece radiates a quiet energy, reflecting the soft tactility of manual labor. The interplay between industrial and decorative materials gestures toward the entanglement of gendered forms of labor in Vietnam, where hardness and softness coexist in tension and balance.
Tra-My Nguyễn’s I’d Blush If I Could is a two-channel video that drifts through the streets of Hanoi, where reflections shimmer across glass shopfronts and the city becomes a screen for memory. Filmed from behind the camera, the artist appears in passing, suspended between movement and stillness. The motorbike, long a fixture of Vietnamese daily life, becomes a vessel for reverie and disorientation. Through fleeting sensations such as wind brushing against fabric, the blur of streetlights, and the uncertainty of direction, the work maps how meaning surfaces in motion, improvisation, and the quiet poetics of the everyday.
Vân-Nhi Nguyễn’s As You Grow Older draws from stacks of family photographs, online dream journals, and images of her immediate community to explore how memory is constructed, deferred, and reimagined. The work reflects a sense of distance from inherited traditions while remaining tethered to their emotional residue, revealing how nostalgia can be both connective and estranging. Displayed against pink floral wallpaper and held up with blue painter’s tape, the photographs resist fixed narratives and instead unfold as a living archive, provisional, dreamlike, and reflective of a generation shaping its own place within a landscape dense with history.
In Wayward Pillars, Edged Expanse, Hạ-Lan Văn approaches carving as a practice of uncovering and clarifying, an improvisational gesture rooted in both play and necessity. Working with reclaimed wood sourced from District 8 in Saigon where communities extend the lives of materials through repair and resale, she brings creaturehood to industrial lumber. Memory is embedded in these materials, not as nostalgia, but as a way of seeing. Fifty hand-cut wood segments, sourced from secondhand furniture and deconstructed buildings, become modular units for world-building. Urgent, intuitive cuts transform these fragments into forms that evoke temples, vortices, or boxes, asking what might emerge when industrial remnants are animated with care and imagination.
Z.T. Nguyễn’s Poem 3 assembles forty 8.5×11″ sheets, each a fragment of the artist’s life: a food wrapper, a towel, a prescription, a note, a printout. Whether built up from scraps or cut down from larger forms, each sheet holds a palpable disjunction between material and dimension. The standardized size evokes the harsh confines of official documents such as citizenship applications, asylum forms, medical bills, and death certificates, and the quiet violence they impose. In compressing lived experience into these frames, Nguyễn reflects on how personal history endures, even when shaped by systems designed to contain it.
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s term architectures of intimacy originally examined the relationships between Asian American designers and immigrant garment workers, revealing disparities in labor and cultural recognition. Similar dynamics emerge in how these artists engage with Vietnam’s material landscape. Tu critiques the tendency to fixate on singular cultural symbols, warning that such representations risk flattening complex realities into digestible, marketable icons. In contrast, the works in this exhibition reflect the inherent adaptability of Vietnamese life, the ability to find poetry in the everyday and transform materials without erasing their histories.
Rather than presenting Vietnam as a static spectacle, these artists engage with its evolving spaces of improvisation. Their works reflect a material language shaped by floral prints, dark wood, aluminum, plastic, and objects that shift between function and meaning. Architectures of Intimacy does not offer a singular narrative but instead underscores Vietnam’s ever-changing nature, shaped by movement, adaptation, and the poetic rhythms of daily life. This year, April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the event that effectively ended the Vietnam War. While diasporic narratives tend to center Vietnamese identity around war trauma, this exhibition seeks to acknowledge a different side of Vietnamese life. It observes mundanity from both real, imagined, and interpolated experiences to see where we are and where we are going. By resisting fixed definitions, the exhibition creates space for an ongoing dialogue, allowing Vietnam to be seen as dynamic, resourceful, and continually unfolding.
Exhibition Dates
March 28 – April 23, 2025
Gallery Hours
Monday – Friday | 12 – 5 PM
Opening Reception
Friday, March 28 | 6 – 8 PM
Curator
Anh Đào Hà
Artist
Tra My Nguyễn, Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Z.T. Nguyễn, Vy Trịnh, Hạ-Lan Văn
Venue
201 46th Street, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, New York 11220
Contact
For more information, please visit
About Curator
Anh Đào Hà is an artist, curator, and arts administrator based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary practice integrates research, writing, curation, and design to bridge personal narratives with broader cultural and material studies. Through an exploration of everyday objects, materials, and pop culture, her work examines their role in shaping collective memory and human infrastructures.
Hà’s practice is ever evolving between Saigon and New York City, fostering a dialogue between the art worlds of each city. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including NYCxDESIGN and Chinatown Soup, among others. She was an artist in residence at AIRHue in Hue, Vietnam in 2024. She holds a BFA in Product & Industrial Design from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Literary Studies from The New School. She currently works at bitforms gallery.
About NARS Foundation
The New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit arts organization committed to supporting artists and curators on an international level as well as engaging the local community in Brooklyn and the Greater New York area. Our mission is to present diverse platforms on which to nurture creative inspiration and innovative cross-pollination of ideas.
NARS exhibition programs are made possible in part through the generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and, in part, supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
(text & photo courtesy of NARS Foundation)
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