Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
Dream
Chi(ê)m Bao
Medium:
Watercolor
Size:
60 x 80 cm
23.6 × 31.5 in
Year:
2014
An ocular form emerges from a storm of yellows, crimsons, and violets, the iris ringed by a lattice of quick white strokes that read as both web and wake. Acrylic and watercolor collide in drags, drips, and arcing sweeps, so space feels like weather more than architecture. Vertical white streaks descend at the picture’s left, while a dark avian silhouette and starburst mark the upper right, creating a cross current that keeps the eye in motion.
Heat gathers at the lower right where rectilinear reds stack like feverish blocks, then breaks across the surface in thin, transparent veils. The title, Dream, turns these gestures into an interior scene. The eye anchors perception, the webbed highlight suggests the fragile net of memory, and the falling lines imply the seep of time.
about the artist
Yui Nguyen is a writer and visual artist in Ho Chi Minh City. He contributes cultural pieces to Vietcetera, where his work connects everyday life to design, language, and craft, in a clear, conversational voice. In the studio he moves between painting, calligraphy, and language experiments. He co-leads Our Vietnamese Project with Pham Phan Nhan, a research practice that treats Vietnamese as a living system inside computational art.
In 2025 the project was named a Lumen Prize Literature and Poetry Award finalist. The shortlist credits Nhan Phan and Yui Nguyen for work that probes the monosyllabic structure of Vietnamese through custom tools and poetics.