Written by Linh Le, A. Farm Curator, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, June 2025
Water flows, drifts, lingers, rises, recedes. Wherever it touches, things blur, break, seep away. “The language of water is the language of dreams.” A murmur, inarticulate, caught in that hazy space between the real and the unreal—like a sound that cannot be voiced, muffled, humming in your ears and mind when water passes over your head.
Borrowing water’s capacity to dissolve boundaries and confinement, Vietnamese-American artist Thom Nguyen conjures portraits of queer bodies through legends and traditions in his latest body of work, spanning oil painting, sculpture, fashion, and installation. Titled Nước | Water Resistance, the exhibition embraces duality, opening a slippery, shifting space where identities are refracted rather than fixed. Nguyen’s figures emerge not as singular representations, but as fluid sites of visibility, refusal, adaptation, and care—submerged, shimmering, or softly resisting the colonial, masculine gaze.
Through Nước | Water Resistance, Nguyen invites us to contemplate what it means to be seen and held in a world that so often renders queer, diasporic bodies illegible. Rather than offering answers, he presents a tide—rising, folding, returning—a dream murmured through water.
Nước | Water Resistance marks Nguyen’s first solo exhibition in Vietnam, showcasing works developed during his residency at A. Farm.”
