Artist Thy tien nguyen slows down the system
At Gasworks in south London, comes Thuy Tien Nguyen report Press, Release it is set to move through the gallery like a machine with its own memory. A skeletal conveyor belt will traverse two spaces, carrying Vietnamese, Thai and British traditional objects along a choreographed route. Its polished steel frame suggests the orderly logic of factories and airports, but the pace feels unhurried. Objects shudder back and forth. They keep moving and then hesitate.
Running from 9 July to 13 September 2026, the solo exhibition marks the Hanoi and Frankfurt-based artist’s first in the UK. The installation is made of modular polished steel and carved fragments of salvaged wood. Along a moving belt are krathongs, small floating bouquets made from banana trunks and leaves, which are released into waterways to let go of negativity and carry wishes for the future. In Nguyen’s hands, this gesture is trapped within a system of circulation, where release is promised but delayed.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, Press, Release, 2026. image courtesy of the artist
softness as pressure record
It is precisely this intensity that gives the practice of Thuy Tien Nguyen softnesswhich is not treated as comfort or decoration. It reads rather as a pressure absorbed by a surface, as a repetition heard through a wall, as a household object bearing a family history.
Throughout the sculpture, sound and installation, the artist it looks closely at how memory adapts and translates over time, often through things that seem ordinary at first glance. Opposite Press, Release at gas plantsher work examines personal and collective memories through common objects that feel familiar yet distorted.
What happens when culture moves away from speed, scale, and aggressive optimization and toward coordination and repair? Nguyen arrives at these ideas through materials that record contact. Memory foam, sugar, piano bench, duct tape. These are simple things, but they hold bodies, habits, failures, and inherited gestures. Her work listens to what the pressure leaves behind.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, Press, Release, 2026. image courtesy of the artist
tired bodies and stiff supports
Everywhere The way we talk (me and grandma and you’re both tired)the artist uses welded aluminum ballet props and memory foam to make a long, spare sculpture. The materials immediately establish a physical relationship. Aluminum arms suggest support, discipline, posture and repetitive training. Memory foam does something else. It takes the shape of the one pushing it and then slowly tries to come back. The work sits between these two behaviors, keeping fatigue within a structure meant to fix the body.
The title brings the grandmother into the room, but in a way that feels familiar rather than explained. Nguyen often lets the family appear through fragments, through the object that remains or the gesture that is constantly repeated. Here, fatigue becomes a common condition for generations. Here, the soft material does the work of memory, while the hard continues to insist on the form.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, The Way We Talk (Me and Grandma and You’re Both Tired), 2022. Image courtesy of the artist
family objects carry what language cannot
This relationship deepens Courteous Integritya 2022 work made of cast caramelized sugar candies from the shape of the artist’s grandmother’s lost leg. The sculpture spans 145cm, thin and fragile, with sweetness becoming a substitute for a broken domestic support. Screened as part of Nha San Collective’s presentation at Documenta 15 in Kassel.
The project is small in scale, but its emotional reach is greater. A missing chair leg indicates the use, age, repair and longevity of household items. Nguyen does not restore the chair or turn it into a pure symbol. It recasts the absence of sugar, a material that can melt, break, attract touch and disappear. The work makes the repair feel temporary and physical. It holds the grandmother through a form that could never fully stabilize.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, Gentle integrity, 2022. image courtesy of the artist
a piano lesson becomes a private scene
In Transfers from home for DecemberNguyen moves from the domestic object to sound. The installation replays the first 25 seconds of Tchaikovsky’s December/Winter through recordings of her stepsister trying to perfect the piece. A piano bench sits at the end of a small, awkwardly shaped room, with sound coming from within. A warm reading light shines through the counter and a toy piano sits nearby. At the entrance, a reflective frame holds a transcript of the stepsister’s performance.
The work makes the practice feel exposed, as viewers are not hearing a polished recital. They hear the repetition, the effort, and the little emotional time of trying again. Nguyen turns the piano bench into an instrument and the hall into a stage for a piece that was never fully mastered. Within the framework of Radical Softness, this is where her work becomes particularly precise. It frames learning as a vulnerable act, with failure seen as evidence of attention rather than something to be erased.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, Transcripts from Home, 2024. image courtesy of the artist
objects in motion, which never arrive
Viewed alongside these earlier works, Press, Release extends Nguyen’s language from family memory to global movement. The conveyor belt evokes the systems that process goods, baggage and labor across borders, while its salvaged wood carries stories of boats and thresholds. Its items are sourced from Vietnam, Thailand and Britain and then run through a machine that denies efficiency. They flicker, reverse, and continue without completion.
The work holds tension between rigidity and movement, memory and erasure, glamor and debris. It also connects the installation to the local histories of Phuket and South London, placing fragmented identities within a wider system of circulation where labor and goods flow and cultures shift through contact. Nguyen’s conveyor belt takes a familiar image of progress and gives it a stutter. The machine is still moving. Its purpose has changed.
