

Yui Nguyen
Academic Artist
10
Years in Practice
You’re crazy, you need to go!
Medium:
Watercolor
Size:
40 x 60 cm
15.7 × 23.6 in
Year:
2022
A masked face floats between a saturated blue field and vertical tongues of orange, the composition split into complementary opposites that heighten tension. Blue and orange sit across the color wheel, a pairing artists use to intensify contrast and pull the eye, from Van Gogh’s experiments to contemporary color teaching. The face is built in small, opaque planes, while the surrounding strokes run in long drips and rises, so figure and ground feel unstable, as if heat and night are competing for space. Commissioned for Mekong Review, a quarterly literary magazine covering writing and culture in Asia, the image mirrors the publication’s clear, pared storytelling by anchoring one emblem inside a charged atmosphere.
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.














