Exhibition “Nước | Water Resistance”

Opening: 07 pm, Sat 28 June 2025
Exhibition: 11 am – 04 pm, 29 June – 05 July 2025*
Floor 6, Amanaki Thảo Điền Hotel
10 Nguyễn Đăng Giai, Thảo Điền, HCMC
*Visit by appointment on Monday, June 30 and Tuesday, July 01 2025

From the organizer:

A. Farm warmly invites you to the Opening reception of “Nước | Water Resistance” — artist Thom Nguyen’s solo exhibition featuring his latest body of works, which were developed during his residency at A. Farm.

Water flows, drifts, lingers, rises, recedes. Wherever it touches, things blur, break, seep away. “The language of water is the language of dreams.” (1) A murmur, inarticulate, caught in that hazy space between the real and the unreal—like a sound that cannot be voiced, muffled, humming in your ears and mind when water passes over your head.

Borrowing water’s capacity to dissolve boundaries and confinement, Vietnamese-American artist Thom Nguyen conjures portraits of queer bodies through legends and traditions in his latest body of work, spanning oil painting, sculpture, installation and fashion. Titled Nước | Water Resistance, the exhibition embraces duality, opening a slippery, shifting space where identities are refracted rather than fixed. Nguyen’s figures emerge not as singular representations, but as fluid sites of visibility, refusal, adaptation, and care—submerged, shimmering, or softly resisting the colonial, masculine gaze.

Through Nước | Water Resistance, Nguyen invites us to contemplate what it means to be seen and held in a world that so often renders queer, diasporic bodies illegible. Rather than offering answers, he presents a tide—rising, folding, returning—a dream murmured through water.

(1) Excerpt from “Language of Water” by Liam Welch, published in nước || water || country (Ajar Press, Summer 2016).

About the artist

Thom Nguyen (b. 1987, HCMC, Vietnam) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation to explore queerness, diasporic memory, and the aesthetics of resistance. His practice engages material transformation as a way to question structures of identity, power, and belonging. Thom Nguyen is a visual artist based in Scituate, Massachusetts. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the U.S. and internationally, including at the Levitate Foundation, Rowan Artist Group, Santa Clara University, Project One Gallery, The San Francisco Academy of Sciences, and Substrate Gallery. Notable exhibitions include his “Divorce” series and “Nocturne Electronica” With a career spanning over a decade, Nguyen explores themes of visibility, transformation, and queerness through his art.

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