Alison Nguyen '23 Exhibits ‘Perforation, Ellipse’ at Storefront for Art and Architecture
Visual Arts alum Alison Nguyen '23 has a solo exhibition, Perforation, Ellipse, at the downtown gallery Storefront for Art and Architecture. The immersive experience combines archival audio of once-banned Vietnamese bolero music with mixed material wall works capturing the feelings and lyrics that were once censored, as well as videos of performance art.
As visitors walk down a hall with screens displaying narrative clips from Nguyen’s film Aisle 9, sensory video abstractions, and archival footage of bolero performances, the centerpiece of the room is a projected 16mm performance of Nguyen shooting an arrow across a city skyline.
“Before it lands, the arrow is suspended in a perpetual state of arrival and departure, recalling Zeno’s paradox, a philosophical argument which proposes that motion is divisible into infinite stillness,” Storefront said of the art film. The evocation of paradox is central to the counter-mythology Nguyen creates around the artifact of bolero music, which was banned by Viet Minh after the American War in Vietnam for its sentimentality and counterrevolutionary cultural force. The music survived for generations within the diaspora and is popular today.
The installation’s wall works, which Nguyen calls Ellipses, are aluminum canvases with gold field and the drawn sheet music of banned bolero artists. In Ellipse 1 (2026, gold on aluminum, 16 x 18 x 3/8 in.), Nguyen recalls Ngô Thụy Miên’s song Niệm khúc cuối (The Last Verse).
The Vietnamese government imprisoned Miên for ten years following a performance of the song, a soaring ballad with lyrics like “Hand in hand, with our imprisoned desires/When our hair turns gray, scars remain of our love/Gazing into your eyes, I long to say 'I love you.'" The sheet music is penned atop a golden circle, evoking the derogatory term “yellow music” or nhạc vàng used by the censoring organization. In Vietnamese, vàng can translate to either yellow or gold.
“Nguyen stages censorship as a paradoxical system that can reproduce the very meanings it seeks to suppress, opposing a binary of freedom and repression,” Storefront said. “By staging cultural memory as an unstable montage, the exhibition questions how narratives of belonging are constructed, mythologized, and controlled. Instead of offering a single story, Nguyen proposes a constellation of moving images whose connections remain open-ended, and move according to the pulse of time drifting, interrupted, and traversing future, past, and present.”
Alison Nguyen is visual artist, filmmaker and educator based in New York City working across video, installation, and sculpture. Her practice combines the particulars of the personal with an exploration into broader forces of history. With approaches of speculative fiction, documentary research, and performance, Nguyen’s practice proposes counter-mythologies.
Alison Nguyen’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art; MIT List Center for Visual Arts; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea; Vienna Secession; The Everson Museum; The Dowse Art Museum; e-flux and Frieze Seoul Film. She has received residencies and fellowships from Pioneer Works, International Studio & Curatorial Program, The Institute of Electronic Arts, BRIC, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center. She has been awarded grants from the NYFA Artist Fellowship in Film/Video, NYSCA, Wave Farm’s Media Art Assistance Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and The New York Community Trust.
Nguyen received her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and her BA in Literary Arts from Brown University. She was a 2023-2024 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. She serves as a part-time Professor in Steinhardt’s BFA Studio Art program at New York University and in Parson’s Photo BFA Program at the New School.