The series began with ‘A Comedy for Mortals – Inferno’ at Lehmann Maupin Seoul in 2023 and will culminate at Lehmann Maupin New York in 2025 with ‘A Comedy for Mortals – Paradiso’.
“Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and history, using narrative to intertwine disparate subjects through artmaking. Across her mediums, Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and the tension between her elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her storytelling. She probes this contrast between form and content by confusing the visual plane, which she achieves by creating intricate visual metaphors nestled within many layers of diverse material. Nguyen works with watercolour and vinyl paint, repeatedly obscuring and revealing her subjects to build friction.
In Nguyen’s version of ‘The Divine Comedy’, Dante’s three epics act as a metaphor for the geopolitics of Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Nguyen constructs narratives that explore the moral gray areas that permeate global history, probing the power language has to shape these ambiguities. Her world building is often ripe with inversion—in ‘Inferno’, Nguyen tracked Dante and Virgil’s descent into hell against the Space Race—up is down, day is night, and large is small. In ‘Purgatorio’, as Dante seeks to purify his soul by ascending Mount Purgatory with Virgil as his guide, Nguyen plots a simultaneous descent into her version of the Grasberg Mine (a project conducted in West Irian, Indonesia from the 1930s–80s)” — Lehmann Maupin.
Image: Tammy Nguyen, ‘Long Live and Prosper’, 2023, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
