Tia-Thuỷ Nguyễn
Floating in the Nothingness
-
From 25th September 2022

In the Richard Rogers Gallery 

"The cloud travels to nowhere but goes everywhere. It is not a conqueror but it flows above everything else. You cannot fight it, you cannot own it". 

Tia-Thuỷ Nguyễn was born in Hanoi in 1981. After graduating from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, she moved to Ukraine, where she achieved her PhD in Fine Arts. For almost 20 years of spanning diverse practices including painting, art installation, fashion design and film production, Tia-Thuỷ's multi-disciplinary career has always showed an ardent admiration for the local Vietnamese traditions, floklores, rituals and beliefs. Being conscious about the difficulties of the Vietnamese art scene, she founded in 2016 The Factory Contemporary Arts Center, the first purpose-built space for contemporary art in Vietnam that aims to be a dynamic destination for art and design display and education. 

Tia-Thuỷ draws her inspiration from her numerous trips between Asia and Europe. From the plane, her sketches and photographs of the sky still constitute a kind of visual diary and are intimately linked to the artist's history; her father having been a pilot during the Vietnam war. 
Since 2018, Tia-Thuỷ has been working on a series of oil paintings illustrating clouds and entitled "I, my, me, cloud".

Following the inauguration of her permanent pavilion, Silver Room, at Château La Coste in 2019, Tia-Thuỷ Nguyễn returns with her first solo exhibition in Europe. 
Floating in the Nothingness is a series of works on canvas with sequins and beads sewn directly onto the support. This working technique undoubtedly refers to the artist's work as a fashion designer. The richness of the textures in the Floating in the Nothingness series offers an almost tactile dimension to the canvases and gives volume to the forms imagined by the artist.

Installed in the Richard Rogers Gallery, Tia-Thuỷ Nguyễn's exhibition offers a unique perspective of looking above the clouds. The 26-metre cantilevered building thus offers a link between heaven and earth, between the real and the celestial; a link that can also be glimpsed in Tia-Thuỷ's work and especially in the title of the exhibition.