Phuong Nguyen: She is a Object of Beauty
Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present She is an Object of Beauty, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptural works by Toronto-based artist Phuong Nguyen (b. 1992, Toronto, Canada). In her first exhibition with the gallery, Nguyen draws from the visual languages of Orientalism and Ornamentalism to examine how the racialized, feminine body is aestheticized, archived, and abstracted鈥攂oth within Western art history and her own lived experience as a Vietnamese diasporic artist.
Across oil paintings, hand-carved wood frames, and suspended mixed-media assemblages, Nguyen brings together aesthetic fragments鈥攑lastic twine, porcelain vessels, lotus candles, dragonfruit, brocade鈥攊nto densely symbolic compositions that consider how beauty and violence often occupy the same form. Referencing Edward Said and Anne Anlin Cheng, Nguyen鈥檚 work contends with the 鈥減eri-human鈥�: figures and objects that are at once animated and emptied, adorned and dismembered, ghostly but never fully gone.
The exhibition鈥檚 title, She is an Object of Beauty, speaks to Nguyen鈥檚 desire to give shape to that which has been flattened by the colonial gaze. Porcelain vases, cork miniatures, and blue-and-white ceramic birds reappear throughout the work鈥攆amiliar, decorative, and strange. Some are broken and reassembled with bright pink twine. Others hover within netted structures or behind translucent screens. In Taxonomy of a Living Thing (2024), a ceramic jar is treated like an anatomical subject鈥攊ts painted body dissected and suspended as if in a lab 鈥� a subject to be proded and inspected. In Skin Thick (2024), a durian-inspired frame surrounds a miniature diorama of Asia-as-fantasy, critiquing both the fetishization of the East and the impossibility of return.
Materiality plays a central role in Nguyen鈥檚 work. Plastic twine鈥攗biquitous in Vietnamese domestic life鈥攊s used to bind, hang, and weave. Oil paint, long associated with Western portraiture, becomes a medium of tension when paired with found objects coded as 鈥淎sian.鈥� Carved frames reference colonial illustrations from L鈥橝rt 脿 Hue, a 1920鈥檚 French volume on the art of Vietnam during the Nguyen Dynasty, while beadwork and ribbon decoration evoke domestic ritual, spiritual offering, and girlhood labor. In Two Moons (2025), recycled pearls and lotus lamps point to ancestral connection across geographies鈥擵ietnam, Mexico, the American South.
Through these works, Nguyen constructs a world that is disjointed and haunted鈥攚here objects function as bodies and bodies, at times, feel like memories. She is an Object of Beauty is a richly textured offering: tender, strange, and sharp-edged. It expands Nguyen鈥檚 ongoing visual inquiry into ornament, erasure, and the quiet defiance of putting broken things back together.
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Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present She is an Object of Beauty, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptural works by Toronto-based artist Phuong Nguyen (b. 1992, Toronto, Canada). In her first exhibition with the gallery, Nguyen draws from the visual languages of Orientalism and Ornamentalism to examine how the racialized, feminine body is aestheticized, archived, and abstracted鈥攂oth within Western art history and her own lived experience as a Vietnamese diasporic artist.
Across oil paintings, hand-carved wood frames, and suspended mixed-media assemblages, Nguyen brings together aesthetic fragments鈥攑lastic twine, porcelain vessels, lotus candles, dragonfruit, brocade鈥攊nto densely symbolic compositions that consider how beauty and violence often occupy the same form. Referencing Edward Said and Anne Anlin Cheng, Nguyen鈥檚 work contends with the 鈥減eri-human鈥�: figures and objects that are at once animated and emptied, adorned and dismembered, ghostly but never fully gone.
The exhibition鈥檚 title, She is an Object of Beauty, speaks to Nguyen鈥檚 desire to give shape to that which has been flattened by the colonial gaze. Porcelain vases, cork miniatures, and blue-and-white ceramic birds reappear throughout the work鈥攆amiliar, decorative, and strange. Some are broken and reassembled with bright pink twine. Others hover within netted structures or behind translucent screens. In Taxonomy of a Living Thing (2024), a ceramic jar is treated like an anatomical subject鈥攊ts painted body dissected and suspended as if in a lab 鈥� a subject to be proded and inspected. In Skin Thick (2024), a durian-inspired frame surrounds a miniature diorama of Asia-as-fantasy, critiquing both the fetishization of the East and the impossibility of return.
Materiality plays a central role in Nguyen鈥檚 work. Plastic twine鈥攗biquitous in Vietnamese domestic life鈥攊s used to bind, hang, and weave. Oil paint, long associated with Western portraiture, becomes a medium of tension when paired with found objects coded as 鈥淎sian.鈥� Carved frames reference colonial illustrations from L鈥橝rt 脿 Hue, a 1920鈥檚 French volume on the art of Vietnam during the Nguyen Dynasty, while beadwork and ribbon decoration evoke domestic ritual, spiritual offering, and girlhood labor. In Two Moons (2025), recycled pearls and lotus lamps point to ancestral connection across geographies鈥擵ietnam, Mexico, the American South.
Through these works, Nguyen constructs a world that is disjointed and haunted鈥攚here objects function as bodies and bodies, at times, feel like memories. She is an Object of Beauty is a richly textured offering: tender, strange, and sharp-edged. It expands Nguyen鈥檚 ongoing visual inquiry into ornament, erasure, and the quiet defiance of putting broken things back together.
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