Thuy Tien Nguyen
Tokyo, 2025
47 x 46 x 62 cm
New York Toronto, 2025
200 x 46 x 56 cm
Beijing Hanoi Paris, 2025
78 x 44 x 65 cm
Stainless steel, plywood, PU leather, steel gears, motor, step motor, music box mechanic
Courtesy the artist
Thuy Tien Nguyen (b. 1993, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a graduate of the Städelschule and lives between Frankfurt am Main and Hanoi. Her artistic practice often begins with the properties of everyday objects. She questions their narrative associations and their communicative power within societal codes.
For And This is Us 2025, Nguyen commissioned the production of three pieces of furniture in Vietnam and had them imported to Germany: a filing cabinet, a boardroom table, and an office chair. These are elements typically found in any standard office environment. She has had them manufactured with high-gloss polished surfaces in reflective dark tones, accented by gleaming steel rods. The refined design language evokes a sense of prestige, yet also standardisation—reminiscent of executive offices in major law firms or corporate headquarters. Nguyen has scaled down the dimensions of the three objects. They have been stripped of their original function to become resonating bodies for a system of gears that plays a melody.
Across cultures and historical periods, the staging of power through the arrangement and design of interior spaces has always been cultivated. The size of a president’s desk, the distance it creates between them and their counterpart, the subtly elevated height of a seat that reinforces hierarchical order, or a room divider separating public from private space—like an ornate folding screen—all serve as spatial tools of power. In Frankfurt’s financial district, where banks and international law firms are based, the spaces where power is exercised and managed are always carefully choreographed.
Nguyen has installed delicate systems of gears into three everyday objects from financial capitalism, which produce a melody via music boxes: “It’s just a burning memory.” The song refers to a music project that centres on the theme of forgetting. It is a slowed-down version of a 1930s original, allowing the past to leave an echo in the present. The mechanism itself was reverse-engineered based on existing models and then recreated by a Vietnamese engineer. To activate the system at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Nguyen uses a voltage converter. This transformation of electrical voltage—from the Vietnamese to German system—serves as a conceptual device within her work. It highlights standardised systems that, when mismatched, produce a distortion: the melody played is altered. The attempt to translate a global aesthetic of office furniture fails slightly; the distorted sound disrupts the illusion of perfection. In many of her works, Nguyen juxtaposes materials with opposing qualities: hard and soft, organic and metallic, solid and fluid.
The three pristine and elegant objects present themselves in their flawless execution. Their refined formal language conveys a sense of universality. They seem to stand as metaphors for global societal and economic systems. Yet they are also the product of outsourced labour within a globalised market economy—one that continues to follow colonial fault lines.
Nguyen reflects on how subtle differences in the design and treatment of materials can convey hierarchical positions. This visual language also carries with it a model of corporate organisation and behaviour that has been adopted worldwide.
Thuy Tien Nguyen (b. 1993, Hanoi, VN) lives and works in Hanoi (VN) and Frankfurt am Main (DE). In 2024, she completed her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule as a Meisterschülerin in the class of Prof. Haegue Yang. Previously, she graduated with a BA from the Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema (VN) in 2015. In her artistic practice, she explores materiality and perception by staging contrasts such as hardness and softness, or dryness and moisture. Her works often create atmospheric scenes that bear traces of past actions and challenge the viewers’ senses.
Her works have been shown in numerous international institutions, festivals, and off-spaces, including Stiftung BINZ39, Zurich (CH), Hanoi Creative Festival Weekend 2024, Hanoi (VN), RAY Triennale at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (TH), Delfina Foundation, London (GB), Documenta 15 at the Stadtmuseum Kassel (DE), and Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden (DE). She has been nominated for several prestigious awards and has won numerous prizes, including the Young Generation Art Award by Monopol Magazine x Degussa (2025), the Städelschule – Portikus e.V. Graduate Prize (2024), the McKinsey Award (2023), the Deutschlandstipendium (2021), the DAAD Prize (2020), and the Ernst & Young Rundgang Prize (2020). Her residencies include the V.A.C. Residency Program in Hanoi, VN (2025), Salonul de proiecte in Bucharest, RO (2024), Koganecho Bazzar in Yokohama, JP (2018), and Mutual Unknow by CuratorsLab in Jakarta, ID (2017).
