Hold Me, 2024
Z.T. Nguyen’s drawing practice considers the conceptual significance of potentiality—that is, the space located between stasis and change, or between uncertainty and desire. Nguyen is interested in how potentiality emerges from histories of refugeeism and migration, political upheaval, and sexuality.
Often set in the nighttime, his works utilize monochromatic washes of bright, alarming colors and unsettling, dreamlike imagery to carve out the psychological contours of tension, contemplation, and longing, while also channeling the fantastical.
His drawings are often delicately displayed, hanging on simple archival tabs—unframed and unadorned. Lightly creased and constructed from 8.5 x11” sheets of paper for ease of transport, Nguyen’s works are meant to be folded, packed, and carried: a further meditation on refugee and queer experiences, and the crossings of various geopolitical, bodily, and psychic thresholds.
In stasis, the prospect of change is simultaneously alluring and terrifying. Is our current reality inevitable? What will it cost to make things different? This tumultuous, unresolved envisaging of change, ultimately, is what Nguyen hopes to reflect in his work—regardless of whether that change is as personal as revelation or as monumental as revolution.
Often set in the nighttime, his works utilize monochromatic washes of bright, alarming colors and unsettling, dreamlike imagery to carve out the psychological contours of tension, contemplation, and longing, while also channeling the fantastical.
His drawings are often delicately displayed, hanging on simple archival tabs—unframed and unadorned. Lightly creased and constructed from 8.5 x11” sheets of paper for ease of transport, Nguyen’s works are meant to be folded, packed, and carried: a further meditation on refugee and queer experiences, and the crossings of various geopolitical, bodily, and psychic thresholds.
In stasis, the prospect of change is simultaneously alluring and terrifying. Is our current reality inevitable? What will it cost to make things different? This tumultuous, unresolved envisaging of change, ultimately, is what Nguyen hopes to reflect in his work—regardless of whether that change is as personal as revelation or as monumental as revolution.