Thuy Tien Nguyen Explores Memory and Materiality in New Gasworks Exhibition

Artist Thuy Tien Nguyen is set to present her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at Gasworks in South London, opening on July 9 and running until September 13, 2026. The exhibition, stemming from a press release by the artist, will feature an installation that moves through the gallery space like a “machine with its own memory.” A skeletal conveyor belt will weave through both exhibition spaces, transporting native Vietnamese, Thai, and British items along a meticulously designed path.

The structure’s polished steel aesthetic evokes the fluid logic of factories and airports, yet its movement is intentionally unstable, described as trembling and hesitant. This exhibition marks a significant moment for the Hanoi and Frankfurt-based artist, offering a deep dive into her practice which consistently examines the adaptation and translation of memories over time, often through seemingly ordinary objects.

Reimagining Memory Through Transport

Nguyen’s installation utilizes modular polished steel and fragments of reclaimed wood. Along the moving conveyor belt, viewers will encounter Krathongs, small floating arrangements traditionally made from banana trunks and leaves, released into waterways to carry wishes for the future. In Nguyen’s hands, this gesture is contained within a circulatory system, promising release but introducing delay and tension. This tension is central to Nguyen’s work, embodying a “softness” that is neither comfort nor decoration, but rather a pressure absorbed by surfaces and a repetition heard through walls—akin to a household object imbued with family history.

Through sculpture, sound, and installation, Nguyen prompts a closer look at how memories are adapted and translated, often manifesting in everyday items that appear familiar yet are subtly distorted. Her work questions the shift from a culture of speed, scale, and aggressive optimization towards alignment and repair. This inquiry is rooted in Nguyen’s documentation of her engagement with materials such as viscoelastic foam, sugar, and piano benches, which she finds hold the imprints of body postures, habits, failures, and inheritances. Her practice “listens to the traces stress leaves behind.”

Exploring Fatigue and Familial Echoes

One featured work, “In the Way of Talking (Grandma you and I are tired),” exemplifies Nguyen’s approach. Constructed from welded aluminum ballet barres and viscoelastic foam, the sculpture establishes an immediate physical relationship between materials. The aluminum suggests support, discipline, and repetitive training, while the viscoelastic foam adapts to pressure before slowly returning to its original shape. The work occupies a liminal space between these two behaviors, embodying fatigue within a structure designed for bodily correction. The title introduces a familial element, hinting at an intimacy born from shared, generational fatigue. Nguyen often evokes family members through fragments, leftover objects, or repeated gestures, highlighting how fatigue has been a common ailment across generations, with soft materials tending to memory and hard materials insisting on form.

Gentle Integrity, another work from 2022, further explores this relationship using cast caramel sugar in the form of a missing chair leg from the artist’s grandmother. This delicate, 145-centimeter-long sculpture, presented at Documenta 15 as part of the Nha San Collective presentation, uses the sweetness of sugar as a surrogate for broken family supports. The missing chair leg signifies use, age, repair, and the longevity of household items. Nguyen does not restore the object but recreates its absence with sugar, a material that melts, breaks, invites touch, and disappears, rendering repair as temporary and physical, supporting the grandmother in a perpetually unstable way.

Sound and the Vulnerability of Learning

Nguyen also delves into sound with “December Manuscripts at Home.” This installation reinterprets the opening 25 seconds of Tchaikovsky’s “December/Winter” through a recording of Tchaikovsky’s stepsisters attempting to perfect the piece. A piano bench in a small room emanates the sounds, with reading lights glowing within and a toy piano nearby. A reflective frame at the entrance displays the stepsisters’ interpretive notes. This piece leaves the viewer with a sense of exposed effort, as the focus is not on the orchestrated solos but on the repetition, the striving, and the small emotional victories of trying again. Nguyen transforms the piano bench into an instrument, turning the room into a stage for performances that were never fully mastered. Within the framework of “radical softness,” her work becomes precise here, viewing learning as an act of vulnerability and failure as a testament to attention rather than something to be erased.

Global Movements and Fragmented Identities

Beyond these personal and familial explorations, the exhibition extends Nguyen’s language from domestic memories to global movements. The conveyor belt directly references systems used to move commodities, luggage, and labor across borders. The reclaimed wood carries the history of ships and thresholds. Items sourced from Vietnam, Thailand, and the UK are processed through an “inefficient machine,” moving hesitantly, retracting, and continuing unfinished. The work maintains a tension between rigidity and movement, memory and erasure, fascination and fragmentation. It also connects the installation to local histories of Phuket and South London, situating fragmented identities within broader circulation systems.

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| Aspecto | Detalle |
|—|—|
| Artista | Thuy Tien Nguyen |
| Ubicación de la Exposición | Gasworks, Londres |
| Fechas de la Exposición | 9 de julio – 13 de septiembre de 2026 |
| Temas Principales | Memoria, materialidad, objetos, transporte, familia |
| Disciplinas Artísticas | Escultura, sonido, instalación |

This exhibition is significant for Paionia7 readers as it highlights how contemporary artists are using innovative material and spatial strategies to engage with complex themes of memory, cultural translation, and global interconnectedness. Nguyen’s work offers a critical perspective on the systems that shape our lives and the ways in which personal and collective histories are embedded within the objects and environments around us.

Fuente: estudioarquitectos.cl, https://estudioarquitectos.cl/2026/06/02/thuy-tien-nguyen-repensando-como-transportamos-recuerdos-a-traves-de-los-objetos/

Datos clave