Kenny Nguyen: Adaptations Opening Celebration and Artist Talk

Join Constellation CLT artist Kenny Nguyen and curator Jamila Brown in conversation for the opening celebration of Nguyen’s installation Adaptations.

About the artist and installation:

The Cambridge Dictionary defines adaptation as “the process in which a living thing changes slightly over time to be able to continue to exist in a particular environment.” Kenny Nguyen feels this process materialized within himself, his lineage, and his methodology of making. Born and raised on a coconut grove in the Ben Tre province of Vietnam, the artist lived a quiet rural life and later moved to the States at the age of 19. This dispersion from his homeland mapped a new internal geography–a subtle double-consciousness that the artist works with– traversing the spiritual and physical, the contemporary and historical. Thinking of himself as a hybrid, Nguyen merges his cultural traditions and the canon of abstract painting and fiber art in an innovative way. Also, in reverence of ancestors who endured histories of colonization and imperialism by the Chinese and French for hundreds to thousands of years, Nguyen’s work processes diasporic data and illuminates the shifting nature of place and identity as an ode to these transmutative legacies and an exploration of his own creative metamorphosis. Nguyen’s training in fashion design and painting pair beautifully to realize his distinct practice–one that both deviates from and expands on tradition, one insistent on adapting to change to find beauty and break barriers.