Nam Duc Nguyen: Painting Beyond Language

In January 2025, Nguyen will open a major two-person exhibition with Lionel Allingham at the Art Gallery of Grand Prairie. Featuring more than twenty of his paintings from the last five years, this exhibition brings together these two abstract painters who, though separated by age, culture, and community, both reflect on the open spaces of Edmonton, Alberta, where they grew up. Sitting down with Format to talk about painting, Nguyen explores navigating international art communities, and painting beyond language. 

Watch Video: On Location with Nam Duc Nguyen in Berlin

Tell us about your trajectory as an artist. When and how did you get started?

I’m really lucky that my family is creative. My dad is a poet. So I was raised in an environment of creativity. My dad would read his poems to his friends, many of whom were also artists or poets. Our house was covered in photographs, prints, and paintings from his friends. Keep in mind, they all worked in the Vietnamese modernist tradition, so it was a really specific community with its own unique aesthetic within Edmonton. I realized from a young age that creativity or art could shape the world, or at least, shape how other people experience the world. And that made me really excited to pursue it myself. 

Do you see any of those influences of Vietnamese modernism in your painting? Do you feel like that impacted the way you paint?

My relationship to Vietnamese modernism is interesting to unpack because while I was raised with this work around me, it was so separate from the culture I grew up in–Edmonton, Alberta. I grew up experiencing this strange clash between my world at home and my experience of integrating into Canada. My parents were refugees so while I saw Vietnamese culture at home, I felt apart from it in some ways because I grew up immersed in Canadian culture. 

This balancing act of multiple identities, cultures, and languages is one that I think is very common for many Canadians–it’s a country of immigrants from many cultures. I think growing up in this dichotomy made me really gravitate toward non-narrative forms of expression; whether it was Indian classical music, or improvisational jazz, or electronic experimental  music, these are all about giving somebody an experience outside of language and outside of narrative. 

To be honest, I didn’t fully grasp my father’s Vietnamese poetry. I don’t feel like I understood the language well enough to fully appreciate his work. But, it sounded really beautiful because in the modernist tradition, he was exploring words as a kind of material. The intonation and quality of how he spoke was enough for me to get something out of it. And not only that, to see it impact the audience and how they were mesmerized by his work made me realize that art, even if it’s not fully understood, could move people.

Tell us about your formal training. How did it impact and shape your work?

Nguyen was trained in several institutions, having first gone to school for a pre-business degree, he changed directions, attending what is now Grant MacEwen University for a two-year program, completing a BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (now Emily Carr University), and finally a Master’s at NSCAD (University) in Halifax. 

I think in a way each school, and each city, taught me the differences of regional conversations and discourse and how these develop. I went to school in the aughts so things are a bit different now with the rise of social media, but then you could really see how a place and its community made its own shorthand for visual-material languages, and discourse. 

At Grant MacEwan  Community College, their emphasis was really on craft and everything there was very rooted in formal training. I learned a lot about skill building and materials. I learned how to draw there, it sounds so simple, but this is a skill that has really carried through my practice. Later, when I went to Vancouver to Emily Carr it was a complete 180. Everything was very conceptual, and very theoretical. The amount of theory was a little bit of a shock and I felt like I had to catch up. I was also lucky to have amazing professors in the painting program, Elizabeth McIntosh, Landon McKenzie, Jordan Broadworth, and others who formed a supportive network in the school for painting.

Then I got a chance to merge those two ways of working and thinking when I went to NSCAD for my masters. It was also a wonderfully interdisciplinary environment. I was able to work with jewelry and ceramic artists, painters, installation artists, sculptors, video – everything under the sun. It was a very small program so that really challenged me to be able to speak and dialogue with each person’s perspective,background and concerns. Now, in hindsight, I can see how working with crafts-oriented artists like ceramics and jewelry was the first kind of hint of what I’m doing now, which is with making my own paint and treating paint more as a craft.

Can you describe your research year and what it meant to your development and practice?

Nguyen was awarded the Joseph Plaskett Award in 2008, which brought him to Europe, funding one year of research and travel.

It was life changing. My proposal for the award was to study historical painting. I made Berlin my base of operations for the year. 

I was able to go across Europe, Western Europe, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid. I looked at as much painting as I possibly could from every era, building up my art historical knowledge. Being a Canadian, I didn’t have access to that type of painting– as these countries want to hold on to them. I discovered the Prado on that trip and the amazing works by Claude Lorrain and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo . I was obsessed with the way these two artists painted surfaces through layering to create an atmosphere. They were like nothing I’d ever seen before, taking a material practice to the point where it felt immaterial or immersive on some level.

After travelling, but keeping this base, you officially relocated to Berlin. Tell us about the artistic community there. How does it compare and contrast with other communities you’ve been a part of?

Berlin is now home for me. It’s a funny thing to say because I think it’s very hard to call yourself a Berliner even after 15 years, partly because so many people come and go. As an international person, there is a huge cultural difference between the Canadian and German art scenes.

A big part of this is because there are so many artists from so many places. You’re constantly challenged with your own assumptions about art. It can be a hard place to develop a network and community because you’re trying to overcome cultural differences. 

In recent years your work has become much more abstract and focused on material. What prompted that shift for you? 

During my research for the Joseph Plaskett Award I studied a lot of Baroque era paintings that depicted atmosphere. I came out of that year making work about atmosphere as a metaphor for the human condition impacted by contemporary concerns like consumerism. This project consumed me for about five years and it was frustrating because I didn’t feel like I attained my goal to recreate that Baroque atmosphere in a contemporary context. In a way this was a good thing because it made me realize how important this problem of craft was for me. So my practice shifted into focusing on craft through  monochrome paintings. 

I remember that I was working on this brown monochrome piece and I had a eureka moment because I had layered this painting with this brown paint and it had some sort of energy to it that was similar to the paint quality that I saw in the works in museums. I did some research and it turned out that brown, being one of the cheapest colours to produce, means that the paints are actually very pure. Colours like burnt umber are essentially made of dirt so the company doesn’t have to add a lot of fillers. I discovered that most other paints aren’t like that. Most commercial paints, unless you pay a lot of money for them, have a ton of fillers in them, which means that they get further away from the pure pigment and it changes their texture, their colour and how they pick up light. 

My ah-ha moment was that I realized that, of course, the paintings I was studying in the museums were all pre-industrial. Meaning, these artists all had to make their own paint. They literally had to grind their own pigments to achieve the colours and surface I was seeing. So I thought, okay, that’s what I need to do. So I started making my own oil paint and through this process my work really opened up. The ideas of atmosphere, of light, really fell into place because I was getting the colour and light that I wanted. I had ultimate control over these elements and it allowed me to open up the work to be less tied to images. Through learning more about my craft I was able to build up an abstract language.

Can you talk about space and place in relation to the work you’re making now? How has that shifted for you?

The sense of space in my paintings is derived from a place, a moment or experience, whether I know it or not when I’m making the painting, I’m picking up on memories of light and space and these are filtered through the abstract language I’ve developed. Growing up in Edmonton–the sky is so expansive, the memories of those skies still resonate in the work I make today. 

The sky is also like a type of space that’s really fascinating to me because it has all the qualities of a great painting. Maybe it’s the first great painting in the sense that has infinite depth, has infinite color, it changes all the time, it surprises you. And when you look at it, you have to look at it again because it’s not what you saw and one moment only lasts a second and then it changes. I’m looking at the sky all the time, and what I learned is that each sky in each place is different. The qualities of light, the architecture (or lack thereof) or openness of a space, the temperature- all of these things change the sky just like they change a painting. 

Similarly to the shifts in culture of the different places I’ve lived, I feel the changes in the sky more than anything. In Vancouver when I lived there, there was a period where it rained for a hundred days straight. It was so gray. In Halifax  it was really dynamic , there would be intense rain and wind one day and then sunny the next. In Berlin, I bike around this park where I live, Tempelhof Park, and as a source of inspiration to remind me of space, of exploring space within this place. I’m constantly looking for spaces in my painting that are informed by this daily exploration of looking up. 

What’s your relationship with mastery in painting? Your current practice feels very tied to mastering your materials.

I like this question because I think that mastery in painting, especially in craft, is fraught. I think mastery can be associated with authority. Mastery can be associated with control and perfection. And those are all fair associations. But I think from my experience of looking at what I would say are masterful paintings whether it’s Rothko, or de Kooning or Joan Mitchell or Rembrandt, having really looked closely at their oeuvre from the beginning you realize that they’ve earned it. That there were steps, that it started somewhere, and through their work they arrived at new understandings of painting. Each artist was exploring something.

That goes to my next point, even though you might associate [mastery] with control and perfection, in my experience, as I’ve gained comfort and knowledge in working with [in using] these pigments, I’ve come to understand that mastery is more about a trial and error process. I think there’s not enough acknowledgement about how necessary failure is in the process of learning. It’s really humbling to try to explore a craft because, not only is it just hard work, hard work is important, but I learned that I have to be extremely attentive and caring in the moment of doing. Every artist, and every great cook, knows this, every great writer knows this. High points are reached really by the artists being on the edge of learning constantly. 

Tell us about your upcoming exhibition at the Art Gallery of Grand Prairie.

I have an exhibition coming up at the Art Gallery of Grand Prairie in January. The opening is  January 30th. It’s a two-person exhibition with the artist Lionel Allingham. It’s curated by Jessica Groome, and Jessica’s concept for the show is part of a series where she brings historical artists within their collection and pairs it with a younger contemporary artist. And so the concept of the show, called “A Second Horizon”–it’s named after one of my paintings–explores how each artist responds to place. In this case the Northern Alberta region; Grand Prairie for Lionel and Edmonton for myself.

It’s in our response to the sky and landscape of the region and how it informs our abstract paintings. It’s stunning to see somebody that I don’t know, [whom] I’ve never talked to, making abstract paintings from the 70s and 80s that are in dialogue with my own, whether I knew it or not, they were…it’s kind of odd.

We both explore glazing, we both explore the kind of expansiveness, we both explore the colors pink and blue, which is a common feature of the sky there. I’m really excited about it. There will be a small book published with it as well, it will feature something like 33 of my works and a large number of Allingham’s work.

This program, initiated by the curator, Jessica Groome, is a great one because it’s making these connections and conversations between artists. 

If you had to recommend your top five places to see art in Berlin, what would you say?

I think for anybody who’s coming to Berlin, my number one would be the Alte Nationalgalerie because everybody must see the Casper David Friedrichs on the top floor. That is one of the  things that Berlin offers, that could be life-changing.

The Brücke Museum in Wilmersdorf, which is a kind of borough in Berlin, has an Expressionism  collection that they also do a good job curating where they pair expressionist works with contemporary artists. 

Les Gemälde Gallery would probably be number three, mostly just for their permanent collection. It’s also a great place if you want to see other things as well, because there’s a large culture complex called Kulturforum. There is also a design museum and I think a drawing collection there as well. 

Neue National has a really strong 20th century art collection. The museum was designed by Mies van der Rohe and it’s beautiful. They have both special exhibitions as well as a great permanent collection. 

I also want to call out the project room, HilbertRaum. It’s an institution in Neukölln and it still continues to exist for over 15 years, it has exhibitions every two weeks, which is an insane schedule. I think there’s always something happening there. It really represents a slice of the local community.

Quels conseils donneriez-vous aux artistes en herbe ou émergents ?

I think that for all artists, but especially those trying to break into the scene, everything’s really about people. You’re making art for other people. You’re looking at art that’s made by another person. I’m not always going out to openings because I have lower social battery, but I love asking for studio visits, giving studio visits, and engaging with other artists one-on-one. I also love to meet up with friends to go see exhibitions together, and just being open for any opportunity to meet new people. 

What role does your portfolio play in your career?

I think my portfolio is very important to my career, but more to my creativity. Of course to my career because it gives people a visual story of my development. My portfolio is the best point of reference to talk about my trajectory as an artist. More recently, I really like it because, as I become more of a seasoned artist, I have this portal to look back at my work and see it in a different light. The portfolio gives insight into your work, which comes from a bit of distance in time as well as in space. I’m able to see my old work again and talk about it with some wisdom and perspective I have now, that wouldn’t necessarily be there in the moment of making, when your ego is attached; sensitive and insecure. It’s interesting to look back at work from a decade ago and see how different my work is, but also how there’s still core ideas, or skills, from that work that I’m carrying forward–that I’m still learning how to do the same things.

To view more of Nguyen’s work, check out his Format portfolio.