Felisa Nguyễn
Felisa Nguyễn (she/her) (b. 2001) is a Canadian artist of Vietnamese descent, living and working in New York City. Her practice is rooted in lived experience as a dispossessed body in the imperial core. Nguyễn’s work is concerned with the dark matter — the untranslatable, the ambiguous, the feelings of loss and absence — in between documented accounts of the past. In her work, quiet gestures reveal the pivoting functions of objects which simultaneously obscure and uncover illegible histories. She examines the malleability of collective and personal memory surrounding orientalism, colonialism, the family, and incarceration, through objects which range from explicitly to ambiguously culturally coded.
Xin Lỗi Means Sorry, 2025
Traffic delineator, found fabric, wood, printed plastic, steel spring
38 x 36 x 8 in.
Courtesy of the artist
A traffic delineator marked “Made in USA”, a wobbling device which draws a feeble border; orchid clips, encouraging the growth of one thing alongside another; mythological creatures turned to take a cowardly stance; the weight of city cobblestones supported, and simultaneously thrown off balance by hand-carved soapstone pagodas — through these sculptures Nguyen works with surrounding objects which are embedded with a breadth of meaning and history.
Another Mountain, 2024
Cobblestone, fabric, wood, orchid stake, orchid clip, carved soapstone
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Xin Lỗi Means Sorry and Another Mountain are mixed-media installations by Felissa Nguyen that examine collective and personal memory around the histories of colonialism, family, and objects that have become culturally coded. Her works analyze the contemporary milieu of “Asianness” and “Vietnameseness” that reflect on exploring the space in between documented histories and lived experiences. Nguyen’s work explores the space between cultural objects and mass-produced commodities to evoke play in the presentation and configuration of these objects.