Anh Nguyen
Anh Nguyen (she/her) is a Vietnamese photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores how cultures shift and adapt outside of their original contexts, through unpacking rituals and mythologies. She draws inspiration from Vietnamese customs and iconographies, and how new meaning is created through interpretation.
Anh graduated from Boston University with a B.S. in photojournalism and completed the Documentary and Visual Journalism program at the International Center of Photography in 2024. She is a Magnum Foundation Fellow, and a recipient of the Aperture x Google Creator Labs Fund.
Work Description
A People of Dragon and Fairy (Con Rồng, Cháu Tiên), 2025
Vinyl photographs, inkjet prints
Installation dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
This project follows members of the New York Vietnamese American Community Association as they prepare for celebrations and commemorations around the 50th anniversary of April 30th — the end of the war in Vietnam, and the beginning of mass Vietnamese migration.
It explores the tension between honoring an ancestral homeland and embracing a new one. These celebrations reenact memories of a version of Vietnam older generations strive to preserve, yet their American values create a growing distance from it.
In the beginning, there was Lạc Long Quân (a dragon king) and Âu Cơ (a mountain fairy). From their union came one hundred children, born from eggs. Knowing their natures could not coexist, they parted. Âu Cơ took fifty to the mountains, Lạc Long Quân fifty to the sea.From this ancient myth, the Vietnamese people were born — divided from the start, but forever bound by origin.
This work brings together photographs made between Vietnam and the United States, in search of what scholar Thy Phu calls visual reunions: imagined moments where scattered histories and distant geographies begin to find one another. Altars, offerings, and rituals appear like portals, bridging worlds real and remembered. In these sacred repetitions, the work moves beyond war and loss, toward a healing space shaped by spirit, memory, and return.