Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
Till Death do us part
Medium:
Watercolor
Size:
30 x 40 cm
11.8 × 15.7 in
Year:
2024
Bands of crimson, umber, and green fold into each other like cliffs and river cuts, while a deep ultramarine sky locks the scene in place. Forms interleave as paired curves, so union and separation read at once. Watercolor moves from soft veils to firmer edges, letting temperature shifts carry the narrative. The Armenia note is plausible in the palette. Yerevan’s tuff gives the region its pink to orange stone, and volcanic formations like the columnar “Basalt Organ” at Garni set a geology of stacked planes and rhythmic breaks that the painting abstracts into color and contour, not topography.
The title draws on the marriage vow line from the Book of Common Prayer, first printed in 1549, where “till death do us part” names a bond defined by permanence and limit. The phrase supplies the work’s emotional armature while the interlocked shapes keep the meaning visual.
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.