“Purgatory is awesome,” says multidisciplinary, Vietnamese American artist Tammy Nguyen. She’s referring to the second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which has been “a jumping-off point” for her work for the past 18 months. “So far, I’ve taken inspiration from the epic and then compared it to geopolitical theater.”
Nguyen’s exhibition at Lehmann Maupin’s Seoul gallery last year juxtaposed Inferno, the first section of the 14th-century epic narrative poem, with the Cold War space race. Her new body of work, “A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio,” on view in an exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in London through April 20, tackles purgatory—the Catholic place of misery in the afterlife—in a similar way, looking to Dante’s ascent of Mount Purgatory, then fusing the allegory with the controversial Grasberg mine, one of the world’s largest deposits of copper and gold.
Tammy Nguyen, Angel with nails on Mount Purgatory. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, SEOUL, AND LONDON
“I’m interested in trying to connect seemingly disparate narratives, histories, or even mythologies through the process of art making,” says Nguyen, whose recent solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (her first institutional exhibition in the U.S.) melded the land reclamation projects in South Vietnam spearheaded by the U.S. Department of State with the 19th-century transcendentalism of American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. “It’s ultimately a project in diasporic exploration: being in between two spaces and understanding that there are many contradictory ideas and values being held in one reality.
Tammy Nguyen, Three Crown of Thorns. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, SEOUL, AND LONDON
Tammy Nguyen, Angels with Dice on Mount Purgatory. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, SEOUL, AND LONDON
Created in her studio, a converted barn in her garden in Connecticut, her paintings, artist books, and works on paper are constructed using a complex visual language of multilayered motifs; and subjects are routinely entangled in a leafy mesh. “There’s overgrowth everywhere, all the time,” she says. For the London exhibit, different types of ferns are central to the exhibition’s vocabulary, as well as shells and an Indian luna moth—all initially drawn from observation, then variously painted, printed, and stamped onto the canvas “to build texture but also embed symbology.”
Artist Tammy Nguyen in her studio. Photo: SHAUN PIERSON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, SEOUL, AND LONDON
Other works incorporate angels (“appropriated versions of the Bernini statues outside of the Vatican”) and dinosaurs (“a reference to Godzilla and the atomic bomb”), forming a more unlikely addition to Nguyen’s richly compelling “Comedy for Mortals.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Spring Issue under the headline “Personal Vision.” Subscribe to the magazine.
