Ahead of her solo exhibition at the ICA Boston, the Vietnamese American artist tells Tatler why multiple perspectives are crucial to understanding the truth, and why we should learn how to embrace moral ambiguity
Not many people would draw parallels between Dante’s Inferno, the epic poem about a descent into hell, and the Cold War-era space race, but artist Tammy Nguyen does. “Both trajectories are into hot unknown places: one into the core of the Earth and the other into the orbit of the sun,” she says.
Nguyen has a knack for finding connections between seemingly disparate, random events and phenomena, and bringing them together under the seductive guise of her intricately detailed, saturated artworks. Closer inspection of her work reveals profound existential observations and queries that tend to evoke confusion. “I like playing with contradictions and, through art, making those contradictions create even more tensions,” she says. “I create problems for myself to explore. I like the challenge.”
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The unusual convergence of Inferno and the space race formed the central topic of her recent exhibition A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno at Lehmann Maupin Seoul, her first solo show with the gallery and her first in South Korea. The show, which comprised works of art on canvas, on paper and in book form, was born out of her interest in classical literature. In the past couple of years, while formulating her Seoul exhibition, she was reading the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s The Republic, which is about our perception of the world and how that impacts our understanding of and search for the truth.
The complex endeavour of searching for truth and meaning re-emerges in Inferno, which the artist was also reading at the time. She became particularly interested in Virgil, the pagan guide in Dante’s Divine Comedy, of which Inferno forms the first part, who embodies “moral confusion” as a figure guiding a Christian, Dante, into the depths of hell while he contemplates what it means to be loyal to God. Because of this, Nguyen finds the story to be provocative and ambiguous, as it “took place at the cusp of a paradigm shift, where values will have to be shuffled and reassigned as right and wrong”.
A similar perspective forms in her work—history, current events, typography, mythological characters, political leaders and natural motifs mingle to tell a larger but ambiguous story. “There isn’t a good and bad [in my art]—there is a complicated ascent with ethics that are collapsing into one another,” she says. “There is no message, but rather malleable and multiple meanings, where there are so many things referencing each other.”
