Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
Safe Space
Medium:
Watercolor
,
Mosaic tiles
Size:
60 x 80 cm
23.6 × 31.5 in
Year:
2025
Soft blue green disks float in a pale field, their edges raised and abraded, while a hand set border of small square tiles encloses the image. Watercolor lays translucent veils, mosaic tesserae add texture and structure, so surface and frame feel physically protected. In mosaic practice, tesserae are small pieces of stone, glass, or ceramic cut to regular shapes and set to form a unified skin, a construction logic echoed by the tiled perimeter here.
The title invites a psychological reading. A safe space is defined as a place intended to be free of threat, and in clinical language security involves a felt base from which to explore. The painting stages that idea as geometry held within a border, calm tones inside, the frame acting like a threshold.
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.