It’s compelling to consider Tammy Nguyen’s work through the lens of semantics—as words, annotations, doodles, images and symbols drawn from a range of sources coalesce into a new code across a stratified surface that reflects the density of human history. This approach is especially pronounced in her latest body of work, which marks her New York debut with Lehmann Maupin, following her 2022 signing with the gallery and a solo exhibition in London last year.
In her layered visual compositions, saturated with signs and meaning, the basis of Nguyen’s semiotically charged practice becomes clear. Layering here isn’t just aesthetic—it builds a visual code that is both personal and universal, one that resists straightforward translation but insists on the complexity of history, memory and perception.
Speaking to Observer a few weeks after the show’s opening, Nguyen described this visual saturation as a kind of maximalist excitement. “I’m always drawn to a sense of fullness—a complete, holistic space,” she reflected, likening the semantic and visual density of her paintings to the experience of walking through a forest. “A forest is this dense natural space that always offers a choice—you can choose to know it in detail, identifying every leaf and species, which brings one kind of enlightenment. Or you can choose not to know, and simply breathe it all in, allowing yourself to feel it fully and immerse yourself in it, which offers a different kind of enlightenment.”
While the apparent chaos and sedimentation of motifs in Nguyen’s work may seem intuitive at first glance, it is in fact anchored in precise historical references—both in content and technique. In the exhibition, each painting is executed on paper laminated onto a Gatorboard panel, beginning with a more instinctive process using water-based media and gradually evolving through successive layers of printing techniques, including silkscreen, rubber stamping, hot stamping and, at times, the application of metal leaf.
Two distinct traditions converge in this layering of methods and materials. On one hand, the use of brushwork and mark-making evokes an Eastern painting sensibility, drawing a connection to the great calligraphers of China and Japan and the way landscapes are traditionally conceived on a vertical plane. On the other, the extensive printing process reflects Nguyen’s background in bookmaking, a discipline that informs her practice not only through its layered materiality and formal structure but also in its narrative approach.
The New York show, “A Comedy for Mortals: Paradiso,” marks the culmination of a three-part exhibition series anchored in Nguyen’s reading of Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s canonical masterpiece of Western literature. The final epic act, Paradiso, is a profoundly spiritual story—but also a deeply secular one. Dante follows his beloved Beatrice into the celestial heavens, seeking to transcend earthly attachments and passions in pursuit of a more universal liberation through faith. Yet the journey is not solely romantic or religious; it is also framed in the text as a quest for endless knowledge.
“The process of obtaining knowledge is described as eating the bread of angels, and that image was so powerful and inspiring to me that I chose to use it as a guiding concept for the show,” Nguyen explains. “I began to draw a connection between this idea of entering a higher realm of understanding and the nuclear arms race.”
Much of the imagery in the exhibition emerges from our simultaneous fascination with and fear of nuclear war. For Nguyen, the theme is deeply personal. As a Vietnamese-American whose parents fled the country, she has long been drawn to the psychological and historical terrain of the Vietnam War and the Cold War. In particular, she has been interested in the concept of the “proxy war”—conflicts in which global superpowers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union avoided direct confrontation by backing opposing sides across Asia, Africa and Latin America. As Nguyen explains, within these indirect battles, the ideological stakes of empire and resistance unfold most vividly—and most tragically.
Both the idea of proxy war and the enduring threat of nuclear conflict feel hauntingly resonant today. Within this context, a central concern of Nguyen’s practice is tracing how global ideologies are inscribed onto individual lives and landscapes—embedded into the fabric of daily experience and extending their reach through environmental contamination and the quiet misappropriation of meaning. “My current work often begins with an investigation into what shapes an ideology—what forms dogma, what constructs a way of thinking,” she explains.
This dissonant polysemy and polyphony of symbols and images gives rise to a kind of fiction that compels the viewer to actively decode and interpret a dense ocean of information. In this way, her paintings are not simply representations but also performances of meaning-making, collapsing the boundaries between image and language, myth and history, perception and ideology.
In Nguyen’s hands, these complex translinguistic and transcultural surfaces—woven from symbols, marginal notes, biological illustrations, literary references, historical documents and maps—become a way to interrogate how knowledge and meaning are created, structured, framed and weaponized, often in service of the machinery of colonialism, science and soft power.
At the same time, Nguyen’s grounding of her work in canonical texts and symbolic systems across time serves as an attempt to reread recent geopolitical history—unveiling how recurring patterns echo enduring aspects of human behavior. “I really enjoyed using canonical texts in that way, creating a connection with people who don’t share my history,” she notes.
Nguyen deliberately plays with archetypal material and historical tropes, weaving together multiple layers of meaning and interconnection between personal experience, political documents, recurring historical circumstances and myth. Her work resists linear storytelling, embracing instead the entropic logic of a visual and semantic cacophony. This cacophony not only reflects the chaos and misinformation of our time but also affirms the urgent need for a multiperspective approach—one that acknowledges the layered complexity of global society and the interconnected nature of human history.
The paintings in the show are populated by distinct figures and symbols—eagles and Frankenstein collide in an absurdist collapse of space, time and meaning, alongside fragments like the moon landing. “I’m taking these recognizable characters or symbols like the eagle or Frankenstein and using them as intellectual devices,” Nguyen explains. “But I’m also reworking them as emotional vehicles to explore different conflicts, tensions and realms of darkness.”
Drawing from public archives and declassified materials, Nguyen incorporates fragments such as Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis notes and Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address—what might initially appear as doodles are, in fact, poignant testaments to the human perspective behind the so-called great men of history. The result is a layered cosmology of meaning, one that blurs the boundary between public history and personal mythology, inviting a more complex and stratified reading of historical events and their reverberations in the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Ultimately, what Nguyen’s art represents is far more than a flat painting—it is a palimpsest of multilevel semantics, with each layer operating according to its own internal logic, translating reality into a distinct code in an effort to make meaning communicable. Her multilayered narration of recent history unfolds across the work, exposing the trauma and drama of its implications and dystopian overtones—only to shift, suddenly and ominously, into a warning: that these events may already be repeating before our eyes, unnoticed by an inattentive or oversaturated gaze.
Yet, as Nguyen’s work suggests, there remains a hope for salvation in the knowledge and experience humanity has accumulated over centuries—an urgent return to mythic and epic narratives as living repositories of ancestral truth that can guide us through rupture. Retrieving a deeper memory embedded in collective experience—a symbolic language older than any mundane crisis—becomes the pathway through chaos, a means of reorientation and survival in troubled times. Her practice becomes an act of mythopoiesis: a call to re-enter the symbolic order and reimagine our existential and political place within the tangled narratives of survival, conflict and meaning, as limited mortals still aspiring to find purpose in our existence.
Tammy Nguyen’s “A Comedy for Mortals: Paradiso” is on view at Lehmann Maupin through August 15, 2025.
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