Michelle Nguyen's Uninhibited Art

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Michelle Nguyen, “Jelly Jamboree,” 2017

oil and pastel on canvas, 48” x 59”

Fresh and uninhibited, Michelle Nguyen’s paintings offer up a steamer trunk of magical, loosely articulated narratives within distorted pictorial space. Rife with possibilities, these are complex mash-ups a Jungian psychologist would love. On view at the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver until Sept. 23, they are packed with odd characters that seem utterly themselves. Brides in various states of undress cavort with pink flamingos in one painting. In another, humanoid monsters with four eyes or two mouths lurk in a decidedly macabre crowd.

Nguyen includes painterly moments that call to mind other artists and movements. The loosely painted nudes tossed in at the bottom of Jelly Jamboree, her most recent work, seem to offer a naturalistic reading of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, for instance, while the buxom women in Six Sisters romp though tropical flora that Henri Rousseau might have painted had he been a Fauve. Yet these paintings, while uneven at times, rarely feel derivative. More than anything, the viewer is destabilized, relegated to an almost incidental role, or perhaps, simply disregarded. Indeed, we do not gaze at these paintings, as much as step tentatively into them, psychologically, at least.

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Michelle Nguyen, “Six Sisters,” 2012

oil and pastel on canvas, 40” x 62”

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Michelle Nguyen, “Carnivory,” 2017

oil and pastel on canvas, 56” x 41”

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Michelle Nguyen, “After Party,” 2016

oil and pastel on canvas, 39” x 62”

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In conversation, the Vancouver artist seems curiously inarticulate, mentioning that she is informed by numerous sources, including authors she has read lately, such as John Berger, who started her thinking about the difference between being nude and being naked. And, of course, like almost everyone who isn’t living in a cave, she is influenced by the constant flow of digital images as the lot of a life lived in the 21st century.

More specifically, her background as the child of Vietnamese refugees, comes into play. “You have this identity where you’re not really quite Canadian, and you’re not really quite Vietnamese,” she says. “This idea of just being stuck in limbo or in-between . . . these weird mash-up worlds, where there are human figures, but there are monsters, all these strange things, some you recognize and some you don’t.”

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Michelle Nguyen, “Apparitions in a Crowd," 2012

oil and pastel on canvas, 60” x 81”

One of her favourite paintings is Apparitions in a Crowd. “I’ve always been interested in the macabre, and as a kid, had an active imagination and always worried about monsters and things. I don't know. I guess in some way they are kind of weird Freudian reflections of my unconscious, or something. I don’t think about it too much, to be honest. People are always asking me these questions and I don’t necessarily know how to answer. There’s a reason you choose painting instead of writing – because I don’t know how to express that in an articulate way in the English language.”

This is the first major show for Nguyen, who grew up in Toronto but now lives in Vancouver, where she studied environmental design at UBC. She has been painting seriously for about five years, but is determined not to get overly analytical about her process. She doesn’t plan ahead, finding it restricts her creative flow. Painting, for her, is meditative, not stressful. “If I don’t like something, I just paint over it and I keep going until I reach a point that I’m happy with.”