“There’s one thing elegant about surfaces,” Alison Nguyen instructed me in her studio in New York Metropolis’s Chinatown. “What do they reveal concerning the torrents beneath them?” It’s simple to dismiss the misleading facades of the digital realm. However in Nguyen’s apply—which spans video, set up, efficiency, and sculpture—surfaces are websites of thriller and chance. Her video works, which discover American mythologies, visible tradition, and digital labor practices, unfold uncanny worlds from shreds of historical past.
Nguyen grew up in New Jersey and made a behavior of “sneaking” into town, the place she scoured Manhattan’s artwork and movie choices. A graduate of Brown College, the place she took courses within the division of contemporary tradition and media (as a result of “all of the freaks and dissidents have been there”), Nguyen discovered her groove as an artist after a interval of winging it and taking odd jobs in post-recession New York: she was a nanny, occasion photographer, and, finally, a researcher for a movie manufacturing firm’s artwork division.
It ought to come as no shock, given Nguyen’s winding early years, that her work is so referentially eclectic, drawing from high and low tradition. In Historical past as Hypnosis (2023), which has been screened in theaters and rearranged into installations, a trio of enigmatic Vietnamese ladies are pushed across the desert and launched right into a shiny downtown Los Angeles. Composed of eerie tableaux and ultradistant lengthy photographs that shut in with creeping zooms, the work gestures at American street films like Thelma and Louise, obliquelylinking their concepts about geography and id to the immigrant’s plight and the ghosts of American imperialism.
Alison Nguyen: My Favourite Software program Is Being Right here, 2021.
Change Order (2024) and the upcoming Aisle 9 are each impressed by the archives of a Taiwanese household’s hosiery enterprise in New York. Although Nguyen, who’s Vietnamese-American, doesn’t draw back from the non-public, she sees her particular person historical past, and her household’s connection to the Asian diaspora, as a method of sparking even greater questions on trendy existence. “Leaning too laborious into one factor is simply not attention-grabbing to me,” Nguyen mentioned, pointing to the ladies’s blackened tooth in Historical past as Hypnosis for instance of how she employs and expands her personal id in her work: her grandmother’s buddy from Saigon blackened her tooth—a conventional beauty apply in Vietnam—however Nguyen decontextualizes the ritual. “I don’t need it to scream ethnographic or different, I simply need it to really feel weird and intriguing.”
A self-proclaimed “tech nerd,” Nguyen is a coder and an beginner graphic designer, expertise which have knowledgeable her use of digital areas and algorithmic intelligence. In 2019, along with her collaborator Achim Koh, she created a machine studying program known as Andra8, which Nguyen visualized as a humanoid lady within the video set up piece My Favourite Software program Is Being Right here (2021). Andra8, an AI assistant, content material creator, and knowledge aggregator rolled up in a single simulated being, epitomizes exploited labor. But Nguyen, in opposition to expectations, urges us to embrace Andra8’s state of alterity. “AI isn’t the enemy,” she mentioned. “It’s the curators and artists who’re already appearing like AI and utilizing these applied sciences in deadened methods.” On the finish of the movie, Andra8 throws a milkshake out of the window and develops her personal subjectivity—it’s a name for us to do the identical.
