thuy tien nguyen rethinks how we might carry memory through familiar objects
By kat barandy I designboom
At Gasworks in south London, Thuy Tien Nguyen’s upcoming exhibition Press, Release is set to move through the gallery like a machine with a memory of its own. A skeletal conveyor belt will snake through two spaces, carrying Vietnamese, Thai, and British vernacular objects along a choreographed path. Its polished steel frame suggests the smooth logic of factories and airports, but the rhythm feels unsettled. Objects shudder forward and back. They keep moving, then hesitate.
Opening from July 9th to September 13th, 2026, the solo show marks the Hanoi- and Frankfurt-based artist’s first in the UK. The installation is built from 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 on waterways to let go of negativity and carry wishes toward the future. In Nguyen’s hands, that gesture becomes caught inside a system of circulation, where release is promised, but delayed.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, Press, Release, 2026. image courtesy the artist
It’s this exact tension that gives Thuy Tien Nguyen’s practice its softness, which isn’t treated as comfort or decoration. It’s read rather as pressure absorbed by a surface, as repetition heard through a wall, as a domestic object carrying a family history.
Across sculpture, sound, and installation, the artist looks closely at the way memory is adjusted and translated over time, often through things that feel ordinary at first glance. Across Press, Release at Gasworks, her work examines personal and collective memories through commonplace objects that feel familiar yet distorted.
What happens when culture turns away from speed, scale, and aggressive optimization, and moves toward attunement and repair? Nguyen arrives at those ideas through materials that register contact. Memory foam, sugar, a piano bench, a conveyor belt. These are simple things, but they hold bodies, habits, failures, and inherited gestures. Her work listens to what pressure leaves behind.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, Press, Release, 2026. image courtesy the artist
Throughout In the manner of speaking (me and grandma and you are both tired), the artist uses welded aluminum ballet brackets and memory foam to build a long, spare sculpture. The materials immediately set up a bodily relationship. Aluminum brackets suggest support, discipline, posture, and repeated training. Memory foam does something else. It takes the shape of what presses into it, then slowly tries to return. The work sits between those two behaviors, holding fatigue inside a structure meant to correct the body.
The title brings the grandmother into the room, but in a way that feels intimate rather than explained. Nguyen often lets family appear through fragments, through the object that remains or the gesture that keeps repeating. Here, tiredness becomes a shared condition across generations. Here, the soft material does the work of remembering, while the hard one keeps insisting on form.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, In the manner of speaking (me and grandma and you are both tired), 2022. image courtesy the artist
That relationship deepens in Gentle Integrity, a 2022 work made from cast caramelized sugar candies taken from the form of the artist’s grandmother’s missing chair leg. The sculpture stretches 145 centimeters, thin and fragile, with sweetness becoming a substitute for a broken domestic support. It was shown as part of Nha San Collective’s presentation at Documenta 15 in Kassel.
The work is small in scale, but its emotional reach is larger. A missing chair leg points to use, age, repair, and the long life of household objects. Nguyen does not restore the chair or turn it into a clean symbol. She recasts the absence in sugar, a material that can melt, crack, attract touch, and disappear. The work makes repair feel temporary and bodily. It holds the grandmother through a form that could never fully stabilize.
Thuy Tien Nguyen, Gentle integrity, 2022. image courtesy the artist
In Transcripts from Home for December, Nguyen moves from the domestic object into sound. The installation reimagines the first 25 seconds of Tchaikovsky’s December/Winter through recordings of her stepsister attempting to perfect the piece. A piano bench sits at the end of a small, awkwardly shaped room, with sound coming from inside it. A warm reading light glows from within the bench, and a toy piano lies nearby. At the entrance, a reflective frame holds a transcript of the stepsister’s interpretation.
The work makes practice feel exposed, as viewers do not hear a polished recital. They hear repetition, effort, and the small emotional weather of trying again. Nguyen turns the piano bench into an instrument and the room into a stage for a piece that was never fully mastered. Within the Radical Softness frame, this is where her work becomes especially precise. She gives form to learning as a vulnerable act, with failure treated as evidence of attention rather than something to erase.
Seen beside these earlier works, Press, Release expands Nguyen’s language from family memory to global movement. The conveyor belt evokes the systems that process goods, luggage, and labor across borders, while its salvaged wood carries histories of boats and thresholds. Its objects come from Vietnam, Thailand, and Britain, then move through a machine that refuses efficiency. They tremble, reverse, and continue without completion.
The work holds tension between rigidity and movement, memory and erasure, glamour and debris. It also connects the installation to the local histories of Phuket and South London, placing fragmented identities inside a broader 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 still moves. Its purpose has changed.
This article was originally published by Designboom.