“There’s something sublime about surfaces,” Alison Nguyen told me in her studio in New York City’s Chinatown. “What do they reveal about the torrents beneath them?” It’s easy to dismiss the deceptive facades of the digital realm. But in Nguyen’s practice—which spans video, installation, performance, and sculpture—surfaces are sites of mystery and possibility. Her video works, which explore American mythologies, visual culture, and digital labor practices, unfold uncanny worlds from shreds of history.
Nguyen grew up in New Jersey and made a habit of “sneaking” into the city, where she scoured Manhattan’s art and film offerings. A graduate of Brown University, where she took classes in the department of modern culture and media (because “all the freaks and dissidents were there”), Nguyen found her groove as an artist after a period of winging it and taking odd jobs in post-recession New York: she was a nanny, event photographer, and, eventually, a researcher for a film production company’s art department.
It should come as no surprise, given Nguyen’s winding early years, that her work is so referentially eclectic, drawing from low and high culture. In History as Hypnosis (2023), which has been screened in theaters and rearranged into installations, a trio of enigmatic Vietnamese women are driven around the desert and released into a glossy downtown Los Angeles. Composed of eerie tableaux and ultradistant long shots that close in with creeping zooms, the work gestures at American road movies like Thelma and Louise, obliquelylinking their ideas about geography and identity to the immigrant’s plight and the ghosts of American imperialism.
Alison Nguyen: My Favorite Software Is Being Here, 2021.
Change Order (2024) and the upcoming Aisle 9 are both inspired by the archives of a Taiwanese family’s hosiery business in New York. Though Nguyen, who is Vietnamese-American, doesn’t shy away from the personal, she sees her individual history, and her family’s connection to the Asian diaspora, as a means of sparking even bigger questions about modern existence. “Leaning too hard into one thing is just not interesting to me,” Nguyen said, pointing to the women’s blackened teeth in History as Hypnosis as an example of how she employs and expands her own identity in her work: her grandmother’s friend from Saigon blackened her teeth—a traditional cosmetic practice in Vietnam—but Nguyen decontextualizes the ritual. “I don’t want it to scream ethnographic or other, I just want it to feel bizarre and intriguing.”
A self-proclaimed “tech nerd,” Nguyen is a coder and an amateur graphic designer, skills that have informed her use of virtual spaces and algorithmic intelligence. In 2019, with her collaborator Achim Koh, she created a machine learning program called Andra8, which Nguyen visualized as a humanoid woman in the video installation piece My Favorite Software Is Being Here (2021). Andra8, an AI assistant, content creator, and data aggregator rolled up in one simulated being, epitomizes exploited labor. Yet Nguyen, against expectations, urges us to embrace Andra8’s state of alterity. “AI isn’t the enemy,” she said. “It’s the curators and artists who are already acting like AI and using these technologies in deadened ways.” At the end of the film, Andra8 throws a milkshake out of the window and develops her own subjectivity—it’s a call for us to do the same.
