Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
The Meadow
Đồng Xanh
Medium:
Watercolor
Size:
60 x 40 cm
23.6 × 15.7 in
Year:
2014
A lone figure in a conical hat stands amid quick strokes of sap and lime, the field broken into short, lateral marks that read as rippling rice paddies under a heavy ochre sky. The dark tree line and palm silhouettes hold the horizon as a flat band, so space compresses and the eye moves by rhythm rather than perspective. The nón lá anchors the scene in rural labor, a cultural emblem tied to rice growing and everyday work in the Mekong Delta, which includes Ben Tre, the coconut rich province named in the painting’s note.
The image fits Yui Nguyen’s practice of reducing forms to legible signs, then letting color fields carry mood. Here, brisk brushwork renders cultivation as motion and light, while the title’s use of green, historically a flexible term in Vietnamese color naming, signals vitality and growth more than a single hue.
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.