At Almine Rech Shanghai, Tia-Thuy Nguyen’s Fields of Resonance gathers nearly twenty paintings, sculptures and installations around a subject the Hanoi-born artist has followed since 2018: the cloud.
It is her third solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in China. The clouds began as a private image. Nguyen’s father was a pilot during the Vietnam War, and the sky carried his memory. Later, travelling between Asia and Europe, she recorded cloudscapes as a kind of visual diary, which grew into the ongoing painting series I, my, me, cloud. “I do not paint nature,” she has written. “I paint the natural energy that flows within me.”
In Fields of Resonance the clouds share the rooms with trees, stone and steel. Nguyen pairs materials that pull against each other: soft oil paint and hard stainless steel, fragile beads and heavy quartz. Light ties them together. She calls it a living entity, something that wakes a surface as a visitor moves past it.
The paintings keep the loose, saturated sky of her earlier work. In Passionate in Supernatural, painted as a storm clears, turquoise, violet, orange and gold rub against each other in wet strokes, the light only beginning to break through.
A sky built from beads
The largest work, Fairer than a Fairy, measures two by three metres and is covered in tens of thousands of beads and sequins. The technique comes from Nguyen’s years in fashion and her long interest in Vietnamese handcraft. The embroidery lifts the clouds off the canvas into low relief. Every change of angle catches the light differently, so the surface never settles into a single image.
Steel that weighs nothing
The Pause Between Storms is the first time Nguyen has shown her stainless-steel weaving. Fine strands of steel are bent and joined by hand into grey cloudscapes. From a distance the three works recall seventeenth- and eighteenth-century landscape etchings, but their lines occupy real space, and every weld keeps the trace of the hand. Woven metal has a history in sculpture, from Ruth Asawa‘s looped wire forms onward. Nguyen frames her version as a meeting of industrial strength and the patience she associates with femininity.
Enduring Vitality takes the same material in another direction. Steel replaces a pencil line, drawing the branches of an old tree across the gallery floor and up the wall, seven metres from end to end. Pulled off the flat surface, the drawing exposes how perspective builds depth. Nguyen wanted the tree released from its usual role of carrying weight. Here it seems to rest.
Stone, mirrors and flowers
Smaller works on plinths continue the cycle. New quartz sculptures sit on steel supports hung with raindrop forms above a mirror, so the falling drops appear to rise again as clouds in the reflection. Many Contradictory Flowers opens a new series of beaded flowers, a continuation of Flower of Life, the oak tree Nguyen made to bloom at Château La Coste in 2023.
The route through Fields of Resonance is deliberately loose. Nguyen asks visitors to keep moving, since the works change as light passes through quartz, sequins and steel. Calm, in her account, need not be quiet. It can be bright, even celebratory, like finding something beautiful in the middle of a storm.
Born in Hanoi in 1981, Nguyen studied at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts and completed a PhD at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. In 2016 she founded The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam. Fields of Resonance runs until 31 October 2026.
Artist: Tia-Thuy Nguyen / @tia.thuynguyen
Photography: Courtesy of the artist
Location: Almine Rech Shanghai, China
