Hanoi-based photographer Vân-Nhi Nguyễn uses family portraits to reconstruct Vietnam’s past. 

A woman sits on a bed in a black tank top and floral shorts, staring directly at the camera. Two large strips of transparent lighting gel are laid out on the bed in front of her, giving the quilt a slick, watery sheen, as if the entire bed had been waterlogged. Behind her hangs a digital print of a tropical beach. Although there are beaches all over Vietnam, the decoration in this particular apartment feels at least three degrees separated from the real world. 

“To me, it reflects a consumerist idea,” photographer Vân-Nhi Nguyên shares over Zoom from her brightly lit Hanoi apartment. “You want to buy something that looks like the real thing, but you want it to last longer than the real thing. Because you want the value for your money, right? Most people would say it’s bad taste, but, to me, taste is so subjective. To them, it’s something cheap but it brings them so much joy.”

Place and memory are recurring themes in the Hanoi-based photographer’s work. It’s her hyper-specific details, like the bedroom decor depicted in the first photograph, that strike a chord for young Vietnamese people. “They kind of feel the same, which is beautiful. There’s something special about an image where you see a person posing idealistically. You look at it and say, ‘It feels like they are building their own dream image.’”

After spending the majority of her adolescence in Toronto, Nguyên returned to Vietnam in 2021. After moving back, she found the place in which she’d grown up altered. Vietnam’s move from colonial control has been relatively recent; it declared independence in 1945. Vietnam, still, has a dynamic identity and increasingly participates in the global market economy. “Everything’s quite fresh and new,” Nguyên elaborates. “We’ve only recently started to develop an identity in art. Often, I have to question what it is to be Vietnamese. There’s not a lot of work being done or history being recorded on the brutality of this identity and how it came to be.”

As a young person educated in Liverpool and Toronto, Nguyên found herself looking for meaning and identity in Western art. “I was trying to [capture] visual elements of my upbringing of only being able to look at European art. I would question why I have to look outside to white art and take an interest in it.”

American photographer Deana Lawson remains a cited influence for Nguyên. Lawson, known for her work exploring aesthetics and relationships of Black America, crafts images that exalt marginalised bodies within domestic spaces. “She struck me as this artist who was able to photograph her people and reconstruct this image of a utopia. It speaks to me as a Vietnamese person who’s quite removed from my own history. So looking at another artist trying to build up a world where you feel beautiful, speaks to the way that I want to carry out my work and each image that I make.”

Typically, Lawson crafts the composition, production design and lighting without the assistance of a crew. But she doesn’t consider her approach authoritative. To Nguyên, her subjects are collaborators as much as they are models. “I like the kind of intimacy where it’s just me and the person that I’m photographing, giving this person all of my undivided attention and finding comfort knowing that this is a space for them to do whatever they want,” Nguyên explains. “I find a reference to one single image. And I’ll give it to this person, and they will interpret it how they want to.” 

Always considering models’ poses and clothing, Nguyê˜n sees her collaborative approach as an “open prompt.” Some subjects are friends, others are travelers she meets while out in the city. “When I used to work in fashion you didn’t know the people you were working with. You’re just being used by other people to make money off of. So, when I was able to make the switch to do more things that resonated with me and my story, I started to meet so many wonderful people who also have that feeling or who generally want to support me. It’s much nicer.”

In an image from her collection, As You Grow Older, a naked male model appears on a daybed, slightly angled toward the camera. His back is riddled with faded brown cupping marks. The circular marks starkly contrast the formal pose. Nguyên said the marks were a surprise that she “rolled with”. It’s details like this that incite viewers to return to her work and uncover new complexities.

Nguyên has garnered editorial success in the last few years, culminating in a special feature in A Magazine Curated by Peter Do that includes a suite of images treading the line between documentary and formal fashion work. Like much of her photography, the people in these images are positioned in various domestic scenes. One lingers on a rosary hanging from a miniature altar of Jesus. In another, two men stand in a corner beside a clothes rack. They wear matching black-and-white Peter Do t-shirts, each reading, ‘When was the last time you were you?’ 

“It was quite a beautiful experience working with Peter and Blake (Abbie), who is the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine,” she recalls. “They both didn’t want the story to be a fashion story. I just wanted to help Peter tell his story of coming back home and what it’s like for him to be away from the country for so long, and then feel like he’s not part of it anymore. I have the same kind of feeling, where, everywhere you go, you’re in this limbo.”

Although many Vietnamese artists relocate to work in the West, Hanoi’s art scene thrives. For the last 15 years, Hanoi contemporary art has sought to break from a 20th century ethos of marrying traditional Vietnamese crafts with European influences. With underground shows and emerging art collectives, Hanoi’s art seeks to find a voice of its own. 

“Artists are responding to each other and the work they make on such a wider scale. It’s exciting. We have a lot of goals and a lot of hopes,” Nguyên tells me. “It’s mind-boggling how people can be extremely radical in this kind of political landscape in Vietnam, where a lot of things get censored.”

During the social media boom of the early 2010s, Facebook was used as a tool for free speech for many in Vietnam, with many sharing sentiments opposing the dominant Communist Party of Vietnam. Soon, Facebook began making concessions to the CPV, and any criticism of party officials was removed. YouTube and TikTok followed suit, complying with the majority of government requests to remove anti-authoritarian content.

“Most of the work doesn’t get approved unless it talks about how clean this city is or how beautiful the landscape in Vietnam is. It’s a very touristic kind of ideal,” Nguyên explains. “Artists are responding by making work that’s true to themselves, but a lot of the time they don’t have the platform to showcase their work, which is also the reason why you don’t get to see a lot of Vietnamese art outside of the country.”

Despite the strict censorship laws, artists have been forming public communities to showcase their work for decades. In 2011, performance artist Lai Thi Dieu Ha’s Skin Iron reached new heights of notoriety, a performance where she reportedly ironed pig bladders onto her skin. 

Shortly after moving back from Toronto, Nguyên attended one of Dieu Ha’s performances of Bay Len (“Fly Up”), which saw her nude body glued with blue feathers and culminated in Dieu Ha placing a live bird in her mouth for several minutes. “It’s still being talked about. During that time, not a lot of people in Vietnam understood what powerful contemporary art was.” 

I mention her archival work—family photos interspersed with her images—as an attempt to mirror that same blending of past and present. “I believe that there’s a dialogue between that same family photo album and the kind that I’m making now,” she tells me. “Like a modern family photo album that breaks out of the binary and traditions. Everything overlaps with each other. That’s why when you look at my work, it feels very chaotic.”

There’s one image in particular of her mother’s friends on a bed, which directly harkens back to Nguyên’s vacation backdrop photo. The two images seem to mirror one another, one recalling the past, the other looking forward to a dreamland, just out of reach. 

“It’s kind of a way to rebuild this memory that I feel like I don’t have anymore. When you dream a dream that is so vivid, you see different scenes where people wear a certain kind of outfit, or they stay in certain types of places. A lot of the time, it draws from rebuilding a world that I wanted to live in as a child.”