Selected Work

So Be It (2025)
Solo Exhibition at Minor Gallery, Copenhagen.

“In So Be It, Minh Ngọc Nguyễn constructs glossy, surreal still lifes where humor, seduction, and estrangement converge. Drawing on the visual language and technical conventions of commercial photography, he isolates and reconfigures everyday objects, transforming them into compositions that are at once playful and destabilising.

Nguyễn’s images negotiate the intimate and the collective, carrying personal nostalgia while resonating on broader cultural wavelengths. They show how the personal intersects with the universal, how distant memory collides with Nordic restraint, and how stereotypes may be dismantled through strategies of playful deconstruction.

Within the chorus of contemporary image culture, his works prompt us to reconsider what we recognise and what remains unseen.

By mobilising still life’s art-historical symbolism and refracting it through the glossy tropes of photography, from the polished seductions of advertising to the vernacular of post-internet culture, Nguyễn opens a distinctive topological space.

Within these frames, cultural signifiers are displaced from their contexts and reframed in tableaux that simultaneously entice and resist, resisting the flattening gaze of both commodification and stereotype.

So Be It embraces contradiction rather than resolving it: East and West, memory and media, suffering and joy. Instead of offering resolution, the works hold these tensions in suspension. They invite us to inhabit vignettes of ambiguity, to question the images we consume, and to let new meanings emerge in the act of looking.“

Wholehearted Chorus (2025)
Installation as part of the exhibtion “K-WHOLE” at ODP3, Curated by Tofu Collective

Archival prints on lightbox panels, each 60x85cm

“For the launch of K-Whole, Minh Ngoc Nguyen produced four site-specific works engaging with the decorative languages of consumer and entertainment spaces such as bowling alleys, amusement arcades and fast-food chains.

These are environments where interiors are designed to project the brand’s core narrative in its most polished and idealised form, reinforcing a promise of immersion and belonging that often slipsinto glossy exaggerations both seductive and artificial.

Drawing on the atmosphere of karaoke, and placed within the karaoke room itself, the works amplify and mirror these aesthetics, prompting us to reflect on how such staged atmospheres choreograph
collective moods while disguising spectacle as sincerity.“

MILKSHAKE #4 (2025)
Duo Exhibition with Christine Clemmesen in MELK, Oslo.

”Two artists who explore materiality and image culture through distinct photographic approaches, yet both engage in contextualizing and questioning the boundaries of the still life genre.“

Press text can be found here

Feel First, Think Later (2025)

Group Exhibition at Andréhn-Schiptjenko in Stockholm. Alongside Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff, Dev Dhunsi, and Sally von Rosen.

Press text can be found here

Sweet, Sweet Nectar (2024)

Solo Exhibition at NEVVEN, Gothenburg.
Press text can be found here

Sour Sun (2021)
Artist Book published by Heavy Books

Buy here

Sour Sun by Minh Ngọc Nguyễn operates as a vocabulary for his photographic work and offers a kaleidoscopic view of tricks and tinkering. Through the guise and semantics of commercial photography and contemporary still life, the book looks to examine shapes of consumerism, taste and fetishization through western visual touchstones of Southeast-Asian culture.

By utilising exaggerated scales, inverted colors, and photographic tropes, along with his fluency in Post-Internet and Southeast Asian visual cultures, the images attempt to re-constitute and dissect somewhat familiar objects.

The images attempt to maintain a lax dichotomy: the presence of superfluous and natural objects, accompanied by reckless artificial lightning, ultimately creating a personal reappropriation of the objects and symbols. These interventions are often created through the manipulation of still life arrangements - acting as agents, to subvert codified expectations of how the images are constructed and understood.

By restructuring the controlled parameters into a space of level playing field and imagination, Sour Sun also points to the ways in which images and visual media inscribe ideas of nationality and the desire for individual concession within photography.