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Phuong Nguyen
SHE IS AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY
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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. 1992, Toronto, 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.
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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.
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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.
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Through these works, Nguyen constructs a world that is both haunted and deceptively seductive—where objects function as bodies and bodies, at times, feel familiar, 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. 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.
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Nguyen’s work confronts the long history of objectifying Asian femininity by exposing how beauty has been used as a tool of control. Her compositions center fragile, ornamental objects—ceramic vases, silk ribbons, porcelain figurines—that have historically symbolized submissive femininity in Western fantasies of the East. But rather than presenting these items as pristine or passive, Nguyen fractures and binds them, wrapping them in twine and threading them through carved frames that resemble cages as much as shrines. This deliberate tension transforms the decorative into the defiant. In presenting beauty as something stitched, cracked, and complicated, Nguyen resists the flattening gaze of Orientalism and reclaims these symbols as expressions of agency, memory, and survival.
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The pieces of blue and white dishware were collected by Nguyen from friends, family, shops, and other various sources. Though she does not depict, as Ai Wei Wei famously did in 1995, the act of destroying any ceramic vessels, the shattering of each dish is present in the remains that make up the works.
- Amelia Wong-Mersereau, Shattering the Fantasy of the Self, 2022
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“She is an Object of Beauty pushes against diminishing notions of Asian femininity and a long history of objectification. Nguyen does so by reclaiming certain materials, ornamentation and what they symbolize. She uses tools of aesthetics, such as opulent frames and sensual forms, as commentary to transform passive objects into layered narratives.”
-Jhazzmyn Joiner
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She is an Object of Beauty: Phuong Nguyen
Current viewing_room
