She is a Object of Beauty: Phuong Nguyen
Atlanta, Georgia — Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present She is an Object of Beauty, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptural works by Toronto-based artist Phuong Nguyen (b. 1990, Mississauga, Canada). In her first exhibition with the gallery, Nguyen draws from the visual languages of Orientalism and Ornamentalism to examine how the racialized, feminine body is aestheticized, archived, and abstracted—both within Western art history and her own lived experience as a Vietnamese diasporic artist.
Across oil paintings, hand-carved wood frames, and suspended mixed-media assemblages, Nguyen brings together aesthetic fragments—plastic twine, porcelain vessels, lotus candles, dragonfruit, brocade—into densely symbolic compositions that consider how beauty and violence often occupy the same form. Referencing Edward Said and Anne Anlin Cheng, Nguyen’s work contends with the “peri-human”: figures and objects that are at once animated and emptied, adorned and dismembered, ghostly but never fully gone.
The exhibition’s title, She is an Object of Beauty, speaks to Nguyen’s desire to give shape to that which has been flattened by the colonial gaze. Porcelain vases, cork miniatures, and blue-and-white ceramic birds reappear throughout the work—familiar, decorative, and strange. Some are broken and reassembled with bright pink twine. Others hover within netted structures or behind translucent screens. In Taxonomy of a Living Thing (2024), a ceramic jar is treated like an anatomical subject—its painted body dissected and suspended as if in a lab – a subject to be proded and inspected. In Skin Thick (2024), a durian-inspired frame surrounds a miniature diorama of Asia-as-fantasy, critiquing both the fetishization of the East and the impossibility of return.
Materiality plays a central role in Nguyen’s work. Plastic twine—ubiquitous in Vietnamese domestic life—is used to bind, hang, and weave. Oil paint, long associated with Western portraiture, becomes a medium of tension when paired with found objects coded as “Asian.” Carved frames reference colonial illustrations from L’Art à Hue, a 1920’s French volume on the art of Vietnam during the Nguyen Dynasty, while beadwork and ribbon decoration evoke domestic ritual, spiritual offering, and girlhood labor. In Two Moons (2025), recycled pearls and lotus lamps point to ancestral connection across geographies—Vietnam, Mexico, the American South.
Through these works, Nguyen constructs a world that is disjointed and haunted—where objects function as bodies and bodies, at times, feel like memories. She is an Object of Beauty is a richly textured offering: tender, strange, and sharp-edged. It expands Nguyen’s ongoing visual inquiry into ornament, erasure, and the quiet defiance of putting broken things back together.
