In July 2024, Kieu-Anh Nguyen undertook one month of residency at Rimbun Dahan. Due to other visa challenges, her second month of residency has been postponed to 2025, but her studio will be open for Open Day on Sunday 25 August 2024, although she will not be present.
About the Artist
Kieu-Anh Nguyen (b. 1997) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hanoi, Vietnam. She enjoys creating spaces to foster inclusive conversations around underrepresented bodies and narratives, notably about women.
Her art practice has foregrounded olfaction as the core line of inquiry to explore memory tracing and care practice, as it has taken the forms of participation and soft sculpture, and often suggests travels between time, spaces, and sensory experiences.
Her work has been exhibited in various spaces, including VIVA ExCon, Vietnamese Women’s Museum, Asia Art Archive and documenta fifteen.
About the Residency
Kieu-Anh has been immersed in inter-liminal spaces, either those given to her or those she created herself through her continuation of work and current exploration in the natural and cultural landscape of the residency.
During the first month of her residency, Kieu-Anh found belonging and familiarity in creating themed bouquets from collecting plants and found objects from the garden at Rimbun Dahan and from Hindu temples on Jalan Ipoh. She then narratively recorded the experiences to reexamine and study means of nativity in nature through the smell of flora and fungi in the garden — those that share similarities and differences with species in neighboring countries. The scented rituals in the Hindu temples, coming from a religion foreign to Kieu-Anh, brought her interest to a fictional discovery of a flawless faunt of protection that came to her in a dream.
When she is not walking around and smelling plants, she is probably in the studio, doing nails eternally — stretching the reality of time and other beings that she encounters on the tiny surfaces of nail replicas. The work experiments with traditional lacquer techniques, and explores “standards of beauty” in both lacquer craft and nail aesthetics. It captures organic encounters with people through a made-up service — “one Eternailty later” — continuing its first chapter from Berlin in May and June this year. At Rimbun Dahan, she has documented every encounter into little nail copies, scanning them onto fish scales found near the pool (thanks to the otter season!), and repeats it in her eternailty.
About the Open Studio
Ironically, while spending most of her headspace living and creating in a borderless world of scent and other means of counting time, Kieu-Anh is unfortunately absent for this Open Studio, not because it was her birthday, but due to an actual border problem. She has been forced to suspend her second month of residency. The flowers she has prepared have wilted, the milk-scented prayers need her presence to recharge their magic, so for now the open studio relies purely on the nail shop’s instruction to continue her residency project.
Please leave Kieu-Anh a copy of your nails, and pretend that we have actually met! Until Kieu-Anh returns to RD, let her take care of your nails in the meantime until you meet (again).