Adieu grandes illusions.
2010, Infinity mirror made from plexi mirrors and glass, neon el-wire, wood frame
30 inches diameter
| TRONG G. NGUYEN | projects.......bio |
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Adieu grandes illusions. |
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Metaphysical GPS HNH Metaphysical GPS counters the modern obsession with always having to know where we are, where we are going, and how to get there, thereby demoting reliance on our own intuition and self-trust. The app considers not only where we are geographically, but more importantly, where we stand geo-metaphysically. Whenever the app is opened, an image of the license plate shed appears, and a different license plate 'locates' you. Invariably, "U R HERE"... Except, if by pure chance you find yourself at one specific GPS coordinate and, at that spot in the world, open the app. 'THERE,' a special message of enlightenment will appear. This coordinate will never be revealed. Good luck. |
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The
Once and Future... A three-tiered cake decorated with acrylic paint frosting and flowers, into which a sword has been plunged. Referencing a Messiah complex and the mythologizing of the "chosen one," from King Arthur to Sir John Dee... |
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Neo-Theo (Possessed
American Flag) Neo-Theo (Possessed American Flag) considers the legal cornerstone of religious tolerance and separation of church and state as originally imported to America via the Dutch settlement on Governors Island in 1624. An American flag with the words “help me” (a reference to the horror film “The Exorcist”) hangs on the wall, surrounded by photographs of gesturing hands that hark back to both stiff fascism and the original salutation for the “Pledge of Allegiance,” as written and prescribed by Francis Bellamy in 1892. A soundtrack plays of children reciting Bellamy’s original words, which did not include “under God” (added only in 1954). With the current wave of Islamic extremism, the Papal scandal, and Tea Party politics, it is fruitful to recall that indeed, it is not religion’s responsibility to breed tolerance or protect an individual’s liberties, but the law’s duty. The altered flag, even in this “theologically possessed” and “desecrated” state, but fully reversible, challenges our respect for the history and laws that protect our civil liberties. |
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Colección
Whitney Colección Whitney is a stocks device that invokes both the medieval torture implement as well as current financial market of “stocks and bonds.” Cruelty and torture, as regressive as such traits may seem in such a 'humane' and technologically advanced world, is alive and well. ‘Colección’ pertains to both the art world and IRS, i.e. tax and collections. |
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Artists
Commercials
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Humanitarians
Not Heroes Humanitarians Not Heroes is Trong G. Nguyen's "artist-as-company" project, initiated in 2002. Established under the umbrella of a legitimate business, HNH markets one type of product a year intended for wide consumption and distribution. The project occupies traditional and novel retail spaces to sell and disseminate concepts that intersect art, fashion, design, and socio-politics. Examining the valuation of objects whose complex functions follow simple form, HNH's mission operates at the perimeters where art and capitalism converge. |
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Library 2007–, rice kernels, ink, mylar Each 5 x 3-1/2 x 1/4 inches The entire text and individual chapters of various books written word for word on grains of rice. A re-interpretation of the library. |
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Only Off Bravo 2010, DVD episodes Only Off Bravo is a project produced by Trong Gia Nguyen for No Longer Empty's "Sixth Borough" exhibition, taking place on Governors Island Summer 2010. Only Off Bravo is a playful, critical parody of Bravo's art world reality tv show Work of Art. Every week, Nguyen records a different viewing party that watches and reacts to the episodes. The artist, who also participated on the show as a contestant, subsequently broadcasts the alternative episodes the same weekend exclusively on Governors Island, using an old television placed in the kitchen. The viewer hears both the dialogue from the show as well as the immediate commentary and response from the viewers. The notion of reality television is literally turned inside out in the Sixth Borough, where one reality exists within and independent of another. |
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Cakes These cakes serve the purpose of celebrating inappropriate things. |
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Dindin Calling Tintin Dindin Calling Tintin is an absurd séance mediated through four “record plates” of spaghetti made from acrylic paint, done up in “solarized” colors. Each record sits on its own portable spinning motor, and an electric candle sits in the center of the table. The noodles spell out texts that summon the spirit of the Belgian cartoon character. |
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Marcel
Duchamp Versus Bobby Fischer Two individuals play a friendly game of chess - best two out of three - while channeling the spirits of masters Marcel Duchamp and Bobby Fischer. The first two matches took place in New York City and the third at Dwarf Gallery/Sequences Real Time Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, site of Fischer's 1973 World Chess Championship victory. |
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Notes
from the Invisible Box of Valery Osser 2008, 754-page hardbound book with one gilded chapter, each with a unique cover 9 x 6 x 2-1/2 inches Written by Nguyen, Notes from the Invisible Box of Valery Osser is a "lost chapter" to the Da Vinci Code. Narrated from the perspective of Marcel Duchamp's diary entries, Nguyen’s text inserts the artist in the role of Priory of Sion grandmaster... The entire Dan Brown novel was reprinted with the page numbers, titles, and authorship removed, and Nguyen's brief text added after Chapter 79. |
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Last Supper at CERN |
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Vai
tas ir kosers? (Latvian
for "Is it kosher?") |
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Last
Supper in Babel Last Supper in Babel is an imagined spaghetti dinner between Christ and his disciples in the town where God confused the languages of its infamous tower's builders. Written out in pasta, a whimsical conversion in twelve languages ensues between the twelve followers, who are waiting for the Messiah. As men do when left together, they gab about the usual - women, sports, and alcohol. |
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The
Glorified Docent |
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Stolnar
Stundir |
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Floor
Plans As with the Diabolical, the main directive here is "entrapment." When a viewer enters any exhibition space, he or she determines the conditions for looking at art -- how long to look at the work, under what aesthetic criteria, and so on. By disarming the notion of the "gaze" and taking control of the seeing process, via displacement and location, these architectural floor plans - cut directly into grass or painted on a floor - render all such control moot, leaving the viewer powerless to inititate the looking process. By simply walking over or entering, the conditions are set for him or her to complicitly "play out the event," whether that be a re-enactment of a Sartre drama, "imprisonment" in the quarters of a Serbian "Women's Room," or assuming a voyeur inside the bedroom of celebrity counsel Kenneth Starr. |
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What
You Get Is What You See This work looks at the notion of preservation, whereby the technology to protect works of art playfully becomes the work itself. |
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Days
of the Week Paintings A take on the Annunciation scene, where religion meets Nirvana (the band) |
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All
You Need Is Love |
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Ready
Set Sail 2007, mixed-media performance with Dance Gang + Jeremy Linzee September 14 and 15, Superbien, Berlin, Germany 40 minutes Ready Set Sail was a mixed-media performance that took place in Berlin at the Superbien Greenhouse for Contemporary Art in September 2007. The collaborative of Dance Gang (Kennis Hawkins and Will Rawls), musician/architect Jeremy Linzee, and artist/curator Trong G. Nguyen mobilized the space and its surrounds as a departure point, lighthouse, and vessel that acted as a beacon, biosphere, and site for "collection." Channeling the author Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel) and explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Hannibal, and Ulysses, Ready Set Sail incorporated dance, music, and interactive performance to investigate the phenomena of locomotion and discovery. |
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Girls
of the Third Situ8ionist International Summit 2007, installation and audio feed As part of the 2007 Conflux Festival in Brooklyn, Nguyen organized on September 16 at NGC Gallery the G3SIS, a closed-door meeting of eight women artists and curators who had been invited and challenged to solve all the world's major economic, socio-political, and environmental problems in one day. No public witnessed the event in New York. However, the summit in its entirety, and the group’s findings, was broadcasted as a radio transmission to Super Bien! in Berlin. Nguyen transformed the greenhouse into a simple 1940s living room where viewers could simply come in, sit down, and travel back in time with technology by listening to what sounded like a radio show from the 1940s, a la Orson Welles. |
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Clock
Radio 2007, Vintage radio with wireless broadcast from an iPod The station on this radio is tuned to the sounds of three persons each speaking accurately the day’s seconds, minutes, and hours, respectively. Each version of this work contains a set of different voices. For this version, the participants are curator Christina Irrgang and artists Elin Hansdottir and Darri Lorenzen. |
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Sonic
Godiva Sonic Godiva was the second in a series of "blockbuster concerts." Broadcasting 8 hours of music from Artists Space's third floor, songs were were “performed” by both live bands and an iPod. Musicians played to an empty space, with speakers concealed and directed out the windows. Passerby on the street could hear but not come in. Obscure Sonic Godiva posters were placed all over the city to promote. Summer Lawns, one of the live bands, covered the Grant Lee Buffalo standard Lady Godiva and Me, which in turned cued a simultaneous re-enactment of Lady Godiva's 11th century nude horseback ride through the streets of Coventry. In this case, it was Greene Street in Soho on a busy Saturday afternoon.The public got their chance to play the role of Peeping Tom. |
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Sonic
Berlin 2007, mixed media performance and installation September 17 and 18, Superbien, Berlin, Germany Like its precursors Sonic Godiva (New York CIty) and Sonic Peekskill, SONIC BERLIN was a site-specific “blockbuster concert” that incorporated both live bands and recorded music inside the Superbien greenhouse. The audience hears only the music and isn't able to see the performers inside. Covered with a special one-way mirror glass, the musicians are able to see out at the viewers but not vice-versa, thus imparting a feeling of dissatisfaction and negation to the experience. The greenhouse acted as a public jam space for musicians, who were invited to come play a set as they pleased. |
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Sonic
Peekskill:
Red Curtain Music Fest Sonic Peekskill was a fictitious blockbuster summer concert broadcasted through an i-Pod inside a second floor apartment located in the center of Peekskill. Headlined by Paul Robeson, the artists were a “dream line-up” that included extant and defunct bands, living and deceased musicians. The work was a tribute to Robeson, the singer and civil rights activist who in 1949 gave a concert in Peekskill on behalf of the African-American and Jewish trade unionists and pacifists that was subsequently marred by rioters and racists. Created to posthumously rectify that occasion, passerby could hear the concert from street level as songs streamed from above. The title of the music festival itself references the paranoic Cold War, as well as an eerie short story, also titled The Red Curtain, from the collection Les Diaboliques, by Jules Amedee Barbey D'Aurevilly. By combining the literary and historical references with the model of influential concerts like Woodstock or Live-Aid, Sonic Peekskill is a project that is part mysterious, part illuminating, and aurally gratifying. |
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Messages
from Guantanamo On
Saturday morning, December 3rd, 200 bottles sent from Guantanamo Bay
washed ashore on South Beach in front of the Cavalier Hotel. |
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The
Diabolical Each monochromatic painting is a variation of the "crime lines" one sees at police stations, used to mark the physical height of suspects. The canvases are renderred in impasto and painted whatever wall color they hang on, or vice-versa. Together, they envelope the viewer inside an "incriminating" space that subtly forces him into a position where the "gaze" is negated and swiveled in favor of the work itself. Lacking this traditional control, the viewer is thereby placed under the installation's watchful scrutiny, and looking becomes an act of paranoia, self-incrimination, guilt, and indecency. |
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Art
Hijack 2005-07 Comprised of Trong G. Nguyen and Elana Rubinfeld, Art Hijack is an art collective that seeks out alternative modes of producing art exhibitions, often through direct engagement and investigation of roles commonly segregated in the art world - artist, dealer, curator, critic, and collector. |
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The
Art Collection of Rick Haatj |
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Signature
Series These paintings contend with issues of attribution, collaboration, authorship, and collection. They are all either bought or found accomplished paintings that importantly, contain a signature on the recto. Subsequently, they have all been altered in one of three ways. Comprised of three respective sub-series, these works focus on the artist’s signature as a validation mark, and thus deal more with the notion of collecting than iconoclasm. More precisely, they examine the control structures behind ownership of works. The contention here is direct: collectors purchase works of art and establish proprietorship over these material goods. In turn, they "consume" as they wish, whether that be hanging a canvas on a lowlit wallspace or painting over the works completely. |
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The
Marquee Collection Altered
works that at one point or another have come through the collection
of the artist. |
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TGN
2001 From
January 1 to December 31, 2001, Nguyen produced a complete INVENTORY
of everything in his Brooklyn studio/apartment using Ebay as the mechanism,
thus playing all the roles on the website that normally exist in the
art world (artist, curator, auctioneer, etc.). |
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Sighing
Reveille |
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HUIS
CLOS
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