Michelle Nguyen

Nguyen's illustrative paintings employ a variety of techniques using oil paint and pastel on a canvas surface. Rife with narrative symbols, her dramatic tableaus sing with chaotic tension and humorous undertones. Painted in jewel tones and highlighted by soft-hued pastels, starkly contrasted by bold gestural markings, Nguyen's works are ready to hang framed or unframed.

Artist description:

Séance (Dinner Theatre) and Pulp (Fragmented) were created after my family trip to Vietnam. It was my first time there and my parents’ first time back since they left in the 1980s due to the Vietnam War. 

I consider Séance (Dinner Theatre) a classic take on a memento mori painting, inspired by Vietnamese altars. The centrepiece is a boiled rooster, which is a dish I saw a lot of on Lunar New Year displays in Huế. I have been interested in the chicken since coming to learn that humans had originally domesticated them for cockfighting, not meat or eggs. The boiled egg with the salmon roe is there to contrast with the chicken. I was eating a lot of persimmons in Canada before my trip as they were in season, while green oranges were some of the fruits I ate a lot of while I was in Vietnam. I have never seen green ripe oranges before until then. I guess I like the contrasts of what’s in season in these two different continents, and I also like the similarities in colour. Salamanders were also a common sight during my stay in Vietnam - they are everywhere.

Jars of ginseng and snake wine are two memorable and consistently present objects I saw while I was there. They were also prominently featured at the Traditional Medicine Museum I visited. Turkey tail mushroom and tea were also two ingredients that stuck with me from said museum. The clove branch and nutmeg are there because of the history of the bloody wars that were fought over spices in the 15th and 16th centuries. Candles are a common sight in both memento mori paintings and Vietnamese altars. The ghostly hand holds a morning glory flower with a spider in it. I didn’t have a particular reason for choosing this flower; it was just part of a reference image I wanted to incorporate, but a quick Google search tells me that morning glory has both medicinal and culinary uses. 

I recently finished reading Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire and have been thinking a lot about the subjectivity of whether or not human beings consider an animal a friend or foe, and how those labels have changed over the course of time. For example, at the very beginning of human agricultural production, having rats was seen as an indication of wealth and prosperity because one only had rats if they had food. As for now, we associate them with poverty and filth. 

I love cats, but they are technically an invasive species. Outdoor cats are also responsible for killing approximately 100 million birds a year in Canada alone. Brookshire ends the book by condemning even the use of the word ‘pest,’ for all of these animals are just creatures out of place - creatures who have the gall to occupy a space which we consider ours, when in reality we do not have more legitimate claim over this world than any other creature.  - Michelle Nguyen, 2024