Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
Hole
Medium:
Watercolor
Size:
40 x 60 cm
15.7 × 23.6 in
Year:
2021
A frontal head emerges from a narrow field of ochre and ash. The skull is shaved, the face simplified, the eyes set with hard color. Watercolor sits in matte veils, acrylic rides on top in thicker pulls, so figure and ground braid into one vertical drift. The mouth is closed, the gaze direct, and the skin reads like plaster scraped by light.
The title links the painting to Min San Wai’s poem “Hole,” an elegy for a 14 year old girl killed by a bullet that pierced a bamboo wall in Meiktila, Myanmar. The poem’s image of a tiny puncture that opens into irreparable loss helps explain the work’s taut surface and the focused stare, a body holding impact without spectacle.
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.