Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
Lily Sunset
Medium:
Watercolor
Size:
40 x 40 cm
15.7 × 15.7 in
Year:
2025
A low band of lilies and dark pads fronts a wide magenta sky, the blossoms picked out in small white notes against rust and violet foliage. Acrylic sits in thin, chalky veils through the sky, then thickens into shorter strokes around the leaves, so space reads as two fields held in tension rather than deep perspective. The composition keeps the horizon low and the flowers upright, letting color temperature carry the scene from cool rose to warmer reds near the waterline.
The work cites Dal Lake in Kashmir, a wetland known for floating gardens and seasonal lotus and lily blooms that crest mid summer, when evening skies can flare over still water. Those conditions make the upward thrust of stems and the high, saturated sky feel exact, not generic. Credible sources document Dal Lake’s floating gardens and July to August lotus bloom, and describe lotus and related aquatic blooms rising above pads on stiff stalks, which aligns with the vertical accents here.
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.