Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, California) works predominantly with video and photography, In her photography Nguyen works improvisationally, staging miniature events and interactions with found materials and detritus, capturing the transient magic of ephemeral processes. Often shooting very close up and with intensely saturated colors, Nguyen purposefully obscures the identity of her objects, hoping to provoke a deeper viewing and empathy. This ongoing tension between alienation and intimacy is central to her practice. In her video works she appropriates, remixes and synthesizes divergent cultural materials like Vietnamese folk poetry, anti-war anthems, and “K-Pop” music to mine what is discovered in their differences.

The limited edition necklaces capture the artist’s interest in how personal, intimate identities are mediated in the collective, outward-looking parts of life, where fashion often operates as a key signifier. Across wide-ranging media, Nguyen creates situations where we must reencounter and reevaluate cultural materials we once thought we understood. She had her first institutional solo show at The Renaissance Society in 2022, titled ‘If Revolution is a Sickness’.

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