Trong Gia Nguyen

Trong Gia Nguyen (born 1971, Saigon, Vietnam) is a multi-disciplinary artist known internationally for his diverse body of works that often examines structures of power in their myriad forms, making attempt to scrutinize the soft foundation upon which contemporary life plays out, often behind the façade of fairness, sincerity, tradition, and civility. Regularly employing humor while at other times engaging in sober reflection, Nguyen’s work elevates doubt as a critical condition through which the underlying mechanisms of our most trusted spaces — domestic, cultural, political, and economic — are revealed and disrupted. Nguyen’s practice spans a wide range of media, from iPhone applications such as Metaphysical GPS to installation, film, painting, sculpture, performance, and web-based projects.

Nguyen received his MFA in Painting at the University of South Florida, and has exhibited widely over two decades in the US and abroad, with recent solo shows including In Perpetuity, La Patinoire Royale/Galerie Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium (2022); Foibles of a Reconstruction, NON Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2021); The Last State, Richard Koh Projects, Bangkok, Thailand (2018); My Myopia, Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, Orlando, FL, USA (2018); and Dogg Days, Jacki Headley University Art Gallery, Chico, CA, USA (2018).

Notable group exhibitions include Where the Sea Remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA, USA; There'll Never Be a Door. You are Inside: Works from the Teixeira de Freitas Collection, curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, Santander Art Gallery, Madrid, Spain; Gun Shy, Artspace1616, Sacramento, CA, USA; 2017 California Pacific Triennial: Building As Ever, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, USA; The Book Lovers, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; ART STAYS 2012, 10th Festival of Contemporary Art, Ptuj, Slovenia; Telefone Sem Fio: Word-Things of Augusto de Campos Revisited, EFA Project Space, New York, NY, USA; The Sixth Borough, curated by No Longer Empty, Governors Island, New York, NY, USA; Satellites in the Night, Freies Museum Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Power to the Brand, curated by Bosko Boskovic, Museum of Contemporary Art of Republic Srpska, Banja Luka, Republic Srpska; Once Upon a Time, curated by Chen Tamir and Jean Barberis, ISE Foundation, New York, NY, USA; Sequences Real Time Festival, Dwarf Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland; 9th Havana Biennial, Fortress of the Three Kings, Havana, Cuba; Float, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY, USA; and Waterways, a collateral project of the 2005 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Renee Vara, Istanbul, Turkey.

Nguyen has received awards and residencies from the Museum of Arts & Design (New York), Artist-in-Residence in the Everglades, LegalArt Miami, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harvestworks Digital Media Center, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Puffin Foundation, among others.

Nguyen lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.