Trong G. Nguyen | Recent Works

All You Need Is Love
2006-2007, mixed-media performance with Dance Gang + Elana Rubinfeld + Jeremy Linzee + Friends

AYNIL is a real-time dating game inspired by the original Dating Game tv show, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and Marcel Duchamp. Each performance of AYNIL uniquely explores the dating customs and mores of its host city. Taking place simultaneously in two spaces connected by a video feed and IM, the event is structured over the course of a dinner. Intentionally complicating matters by communicating in many modes, artists and audience work to uncross the stars, and ultimately, make a love connection.

Ready Set Sail
2007, mixed-media performance with Dance Gang + Jeremy Linzee
September 14 and 15, Superbien, Berlin, Germany
40 minutes

Ready Set Sail was a mixed-media performance that took place in Berlin at the Superbien Greenhouse for Contemporary Art in September 2007. The collaborative of Dance Gang (Kennis Hawkins and Will Rawls), musician/architect Jeremy Linzee, and artist/curator Trong G. Nguyen mobilized the space and its surrounds as a departure point, lighthouse, and vessel that acted as a beacon, biosphere, and site for "collection." Channeling the author Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel) and explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Hannibal, and Ulysses, Ready Set Sail incorporated dance, music, and interactive performance to investigate the phenomena of locomotion and discovery.

Days of the Week Paintings
2007, 7 paintings embedded in one another and diminishing in scale
Ink on wood, dimensions variable (largest 54 x 54 inches)

Each painting represents a day of the week, and is intended to hang on the wall in a single spot, removing a painting to represent each day as necessary.

The image is a depiction of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she is to conceive a divine child. In this version, that act is constituted as one of ex-post facto “non-consensual” sex with a minor, which in this day and age would be constituted as rape. The text scroll in each painting differs and is the sequential lyrics to the chorus of the Nirvana song Rape Me.

Girls of the Third Situ8ionist International Summit
2007, installation and audio feed

As part of the 2007 Conflux Festival in Brooklyn, Nguyen organized on September 16 at NGC Gallery the G3SIS, a closed-door meeting of eight women artists and curators who had been invited and challenged to solve all the world's major economic, socio-political, and environmental problems in one day. No public witnessed the event in New York. However, the summit in its entirety, and the group’s findings, was broadcasted as a radio transmission to Super Bien! in Berlin. Nguyen transformed the greenhouse into a simple 1940s living room where viewers could simply come in, sit down, and travel back in time with technology by listening to what sounded like a radio show from the 1940s, a la Orson Welles.

Sonic Berlin
2007, mixed media performance and installation
September 17 and 18, Superbien, Berlin, Germany

Like its precursors Sonic Godiva (New York CIty) and Sonic Peekskill, SONIC BERLIN was a site-specific “blockbuster concert” that incorporated both live bands and recorded music inside the Superbien greenhouse. The audience hears only the music and isn't able to see the performers inside. Covered with a special one-way mirror glass, the musicians are able to see out at the viewers but not vice-versa, thus imparting a feeling of dissatisfaction and negation to the experience. The greenhouse acted as a public jam space for musicians, who were invited to come play a set as they pleased.

Clock Radio
2007, Vintage radio with wireless broadcast from an iPod

The station on this radio is tuned to the sounds of three persons each speaking accurately the day’s seconds, minutes, and hours, respectively. Each version of this work contains a set of different voices. For this version, the participants are curator Christina Irrgang and artists Elin Hansdottir and Darri Lorenzen.

Library
2007, rice kernels, ink, mylar
Each 5 x 3-1/2 x 1/4 inches

The entire text, first, or last chapters of various books entirely written on grains of rice. A re-interpretation of the library.

Stolnar Stundir
October 21, 2006, Reykjavik, mixed media

For the Sequences: Real Time Festival, Nguyen buried a work titled Time Capsule of Appropriated Objects (to be Opened at Time's End) at an undisclosed location in Iceland. Upon the artist’s demise, the work’s GPS coordinates shall be given to an inheritor who will in turn pass it on, and on. The burial was videoed and broadcasted live to Safn Foundation, where the band Seabear played an improvised score to accompany Nguyen’s mission. As the tricky title indicates, every item inside this time capsule is stolen!

Thwarting the notion of what a time capsule is suppose to be, the object does not reward patience or posterity, but rather, finds satisfaction in loss, lament, and dismissal. It is the resigned fate of Kronos devouring his children.

Floor Plans
(1998-2006), mixed media installation
DImensions and arrangement variable

As with the Diabolical, the main directive here is "entrapment."

When a viewer enters any exhibition space, he or she determines the conditions for looking at art -- how long to look at the work, under what aesthetic criteria, and so on. By disarming the notion of the "gaze" and taking control of the seeing process, via displacement and location, these architectural floor plans - cut directly into grass or painted on a floor - render all such control moot, leaving the viewer powerless to inititate the looking process. By simply walking over or entering, the conditions are set for him or her to complicitly "play out the event," whether that be a re-enactment of a Sartre drama, "imprisonment" in the quarters of a Serbian "Women's Room," or assuming a voyeur inside the bedroom of celebrity counsel Kenneth Starr.

Sonic Godiva
(November 19, 2005), mixed media performance and installation
New York, NY

Sonic Godiva was the second in a series of "blockbuster concerts." Broadcasting 8 hours of music from Artists Space's third floor, songs were were “performed” by both live bands and an iPod. Musicians played to an empty space, with speakers concealed and directed out the windows. Passerby on the street could hear but not come in. Obscure Sonic Godiva posters were placed all over the city to promote.

Summer Lawns, one of the live bands, covered the Grant Lee Buffalo standard Lady Godiva and Me, which in turned cued a simultaneous re-enactment of Lady Godiva's 11th century nude horsback ride through the streets of Coventry. In this case, it was Greene Street in Soho on a busy Saturday afternoon.The public got their chance to play the role of Peeping Tom.

Messages from Guantanamo
(2005), installation of 200 glass and plastic bottles
Miami, Florida

On Saturday morning, December 3rd, 200 bottles sent from Guantanamo Bay washed ashore on South Beach in front of the Cavalier Hotel.

The glass and plastic bottles contained notes, photographs, leaflets, objects, and evidential, SOS variety of materials set adrift "directly" by "enemy combatants" incarcerated there since 2002 by the United States government with intent to evade jurisdiction of both domestic and international law. Evidence of inhumane treatment and torture abounds, as the "quaint" Geneva Conventions and basic rights to due process have been completely ignored. After three years, at the time of this performance, many of the remaining 500 inmates still had not been charged with any crime. Messages from Guantanamo gave voice to those who did not even have an identity.

The Diabolical
(2001-), installation of impasto acrylic on canvas paintings
colored exactly the same as walls
Dimensions and arrangement variable

Each monochromatic painting is a variation of the "crime lines" one sees at police stations, used to mark the physical height of suspects. The canvases are renderred in impasto and painted whatever wall color they hang on, or vice-versa.

Together, they envelope the viewer inside an "incriminating" space that subtly forces him into a position where the "gaze" is negated and swiveled in favor of the work itself. Lacking this traditional control, the viewer is thereby placed under the installation's watchful scrutiny, and looking becomes an act of paranoia, self-incrimination, guilt, and indecency.

Art Hijack

Comprised of Trong G. Nguyen and Elana Rubinfeld, Art Hijack is an art collective that seeks out alternative modes of producing art exhibitions, often through direct engagement and investigation of roles commonly segregated in the art world - artist, dealer, curator, critic, and collector.

Cakes
(2005-), Custom cakes with frosting decorations made of oil paint
With aluminum cake stand and plexi dome (not shown)
14 x 13-1/2 x 13-1/2 inches

Sonic Peekskill: Red Curtain Music Fest
(2004), mixed media installation
Peekskill, NY

Sonic Peekskill was a fictitious blockbuster summer concert broadcasted through an i-Pod inside a second floor apartment located in the center of Peekskill. Headlined by Paul Robeson, the artists were a “dream line-up” that included extant and defunct bands, living and deceased musicians.

The work was a tribute to Robeson, the singer and civil rights activist who in 1949 gave a concert in Peekskill on behalf of the African-American and Jewish trade unionists and pacifists that was subsequently marred by rioters and racists.

Created to posthumously rectify that occasion, passerby could hear the concert from street level as songs streamed from above. The title of the music festival itself references the paranoic Cold War, as well as an eerie short story, also titled The Red Curtain, from the collection Les Diaboliques, by Jules Amedee Barbey D'Aurevilly. By combining the literary and historical references with the model of influential concerts like Woodstock or Live-Aid, Sonic Peekskill is a project that is part mysterious, part illuminating, and aurally gratifying.

Art Hijack Presents the Art Collection of Rick Haatj
(2004-), mixed media installation

The Collection of Rick Haatj is a body of forged works by Nguyen and Rubinfeld that are currently stolen or missing. The project was presented as a social event in the penthouse of the Roger Smith Hotel, where selected viewers were introduced to Mr. Haatj's prestigious collection without any knowledge of Art Hijack's interventions.

Signature Series
(2003-), altered found paintings
Dimensions variable

These paintings contend with issues of attribution, collaboration, authorship, and collection. They are all either bought or found accomplished paintings that importantly, contain a signature on the recto. Subsequently, they have all been altered in one of three ways.

Comprised of three respective sub-series, these works focus on the artist’s signature as a validation mark, and thus deal more with the notion of collecting than iconoclasm. More precisely, they examine the control structures behind ownership of works. The contention here is direct: collectors purchase works of art and establish proprietorship over these material goods. In turn, they "consume" as they wish, whether that be hanging a canvas on a lowlit wallspace or painting over the works completely.

Possessed American Flag
(2004), Creased nylon American flag
60 x 36 inches

Growing up a catholic, one of my most terrifying experiences as a child was being made to watch the 1977 horror flick The Exorcist. Its graphic images of possessed souls wrestled by good and evil created a lasting harrow.

In one particular scene, the child Regan pleads "help me" as an imprint of raised skin on her abdomen, unable to use her normal voice while bedding with the dark side.

Taking this cue, Possessed American Flag is simply the same message in the same script creased by hand onto a standard American flag. Flags are evil.

The Marquee Collection
(2001 to present)

Altered works that at one point or another have come through the collection of the artist.

TGN 2001
(2001), Ebay yearlong performance project

From January 1 to December 31, 2001, Nguyen produced a complete INVENTORY of everything in his Brooklyn studio/apartment using Ebay as the mechanism, thus playing all the roles on the website that normally exist in the art world (artist, curator, auctioneer, etc.).

Every object was photographed and described similarly to condition reports at museums. In addition, Nguyen subversively embedded additional projects within the project, including selling "conceptual objects" (such as "Nothingnesss") and incorporating a "live photo album" that involved the artist shooting an image each day and auctioning it on Ebay that same evening.

Sighing Reveille
1998, Installation of four 'curtain/flags' made of wood dowels, wallpaper (Lybia), plastic wrap (Romania), laser copies (Russia), acrylic paint (South Africa)
Arragement variable
Each 8 x 12 feet