Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
Salt Lake
Medium:
Watercolor
,
Modeling paste
Size:
80 x 60 cm
31.5 × 23.6 in
Year:
2025
A low ridge of pink red water spans the center, capped by a soft ochre sky and backed by distant mountains. At the front edge, thick modeling paste forms a chalky salt crust cut by branching veins of crimson, turning texture into subject. The horizon sits high, so the lake reads as a dense band of color rather than deep space. This palette and structure match Maharloo Salt Lake near Shiraz, whose hypersaline water turns pink to red in dry months as salt tolerant algae and microbes proliferate, and whose shoreline hardens into white salt beds as evaporation rises.
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.