Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
Fishing Village
Medium:
Watercolor
Size:
60 x 40 cm
23.6 × 15.7 in
Year:
2016
A figure in a conical hat stands before draped fishing nets, set against dark headlands and an ember sky with a red sun. Watercolor lays in saturated oranges and blacks, so land becomes a single band that compresses depth while the nets trace bright arcs across the middle ground. The hat reads as a cultural anchor associated with rural labor and coastal life in Vietnam.
The setting points to Phan Rang in Ninh Thuan, a coast known for salt fields, fishing villages, and net making seen along Vinh Hy Bay. These references clarify the painting’s emphasis on working gear, shoreline silhouettes, and late light over tidal flats. The hot sky presses forward, the nets create a rhythmic scaffold, and the solitary figure sets scale and narrative without literal detail.
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.