Vinh Mai NguyễnARTIST, WRITER & EDITOR
Vinh Mai Nguyễn (b. 1998, Morgan City, Louisiana) is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and editor whose practice spans bodily augmentation, experimental writing, and digital interface. They create poetic systems—AR filters, press-on nails, essays, and speculative environments—that explore how language and permeabilities morph across touch, screen, and time.
Drawing from queer nightlife, Vietnamese American memory, and feminist posthumanism, their work has appeared in i-D Italy, Artbook @ MoMA PS1, ChaShaMa, Usagi NY, and virtual spaces like New Art City. They are currently completing their Master’s at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where they helped edit Adjacent - the student journal on emerging media - across issues 11 (Labor) and 12 (Becoming).
Vinh is drawn to the illegible, the ornamental, and the mundane glitch. Their practice often welcomes audiences who may not recognize art as art at first—embracing fantasy, refusal, and what Édouard Glissant called “the right to opacity.”
SEP 30, 2025
Vinh creates work that exists in the spaces between editorial writing and visual art, between body and technology, and between personal history and speculative futures. Their practice spans AR filters, sculptural nail forms, and interactive text systems, all exploring what they call "the mundanity of the transgressive."
Can you tell us about your path from journalism into art, and how writing continues to shape the way you think about making work?
I came to journalism as a history nerd. Journalists write the first draft of history, the on-the-ground perspectives that are later filtered through our collective attention and calcify into something we can hold onto, anchor points in the worlds we inhabit and navigate. In shifting to art, I wanted to ask broader questions concerning the immutable using these tools of orientation. What will hold water in 10, 100, 1,000 years from now? What events, paradigms, and shifts remain relevant hundreds of years from their initial inception? Writing as a medium, mode, and topic of work may be one answer as a markedly unstable environment for recent practice. It feels impossible to me to write without unraveling. In all my work, this oftentimes consumptive pulse stops me from making work at all. There's already so much shit out there. My current project, Palimpsest, adds more to the pile and addresses these excesses in the form of speculative text environments that shift and dissolve in response to user input.
You describe queer nightlife, Vietnamese American memory, and feminist posthumanism as sources for your work. How do these different strands come together in your practice?
I began making wearable sculptural artifacts as an extension of an expansive gender self-expression journey germinating from the queer nightlife scene in NYC. Only later did I connect the dots towards Vietnamese American memory as a common practice for Vietnamese women; my mom is a nail technician and has been all my life. Early on in my practice, I saw press-on nails in relation to what theorist Astrida Neimanis described in her book Bodies of Water as prosthetic technologies of augmentation that modulate our encounter with the world and one another, and in turn reshape what and how we know the world. Bodies of Water draws emphasis towards the ordinariness of our permeabilities. All she says, in short, is that we are indebted to one another, and the depths of these debts remain intractably unknown to us. There's a tender tendency in the Viet diaspora of cultural capture, wherein pre-Vietnam War aesthetics of a very specific 80s time and space carry themselves over to the present in curious perpendicularity with a divergent Vietnamese modernity. Queer nightlife for me traces a way towards translocality and temporality - a beginning and endpoint for language and art.
Your practice spans AR filters, speculative text systems, and sculptural nail forms. How do you see these different mediums connecting, and what ties them together in your work?
I think of my practice as in search of a way out of medium agnosticism, towards an opposite that's not just pure faith. AR filters and sculptural nail forms were obvious entrypoints into ephemeral bodily augmentation and have always appealed to me because of how they undercut what can sometimes feel like my predisposition for a more siloed process of creation - they prioritize collectivity as indispensable form. Speculative text systems for me emerge from a similar interest in the co-creative capacity. None of these mediums can exist without the users, the visitors, the wearers, my collaborators, and friends among them. In moving from medium to medium, I might be attempting to dedicate myself to what novelist Jackie Ess describes as spinning a "Being from Becoming" - a soul in eternal transition searching for the spirit that remains across them all.
Your work often uses the body itself—through nails or filters—as interface. What attracts you to working at the boundary between text, body, and technology? How do you imagine the body in your practice, as surface, as archive—as site of transformation?
I think of my practice as in search of a way out of medium agnosticism, towards an opposite that's not just pure faith. AR filters and sculptural nail forms were obvious entrypoints into ephemeral bodily augmentation and have always appealed to me because of how they undercut what can sometimes feel like my predisposition for a more siloed process of creation - they prioritize collectivity as indispensable form. Speculative text systems for me emerge from a similar interest in the co-creative capacity. None of these mediums can exist without the users, the visitors, the wearers, my collaborators, and friends among them. In moving from medium to medium, I might be attempting to dedicate myself to what novelist Jackie Ess describes as spinning a "Being from Becoming" - a soul in eternal transition searching for the spirit that remains across them all.
Your work often uses the body itself—through nails or filters—as interface. What attracts you to working at the boundary between text, body, and technology? How do you imagine the body in your practice, as surface, as archive—as site of transformation?
I have this impulse towards ornamentation that I've been sort of resituating as a stage in my practice. Nails as ornamentation, AR as ornament. Do these sound right? To reach past boundaries of text, body, and technology is to resituate their origins. I'm interested in reifying the mundanity of the transgressive. How can we rehabituate ourselves towards new normalities? What comes apart in arguments for extant truths, that of the body, the waking world, of surfaces? Caroline Busta has said there is a need to "intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities" in the modern age. There's the surface of the screen, of the page, a flattening of the world we approach through interfaces that both magnify the distance and differences between infinitely compiling variables. As my work has evolved, I've become less interested in the body and more with presence, which might be relocated outside of the body in any number of ways, paradigmatic of which may be our online avatars.
Tell us about some of the artistic and cultural influences that have shaped your approach?
Alok Vaid-Menon, Jenkin Van Zyl, and Jackie Ess are some performance artists and writers who are usually top of my mind, at least at the moment, when I consider my approach as an artist. Vaid-Menon provides me the urgency and comedic lightness that act as dual undertows in my approach to life and art. Van Zyl so playfully commits to aesthetic rigour and for me represents a true North Star for anyone looking to approach interdisciplinary worldbuilding. I recently read Darryl by Jackie Ess for the first time and can't stop thinking about it. As a text, it's so funny and approachable while deconstructing and bringing to life anew these ex post facto questions regarding psychosexual truth, mimesis, power dynamics, and transitioning? I collect many strands in elliptical spiral like suspension on my Are.na. Currently, I'm revisiting my channel on Sianne Ngai's Theory of the Gimmick, which describes a gimmick as something working both too hard and too little. Art as a site of questionable labor-value production is something I'm, to once again fall into this odd trap of corporate speak, keeping top of mind as I accelerate into the trajectory of the capital-A Artist. It's also a great read for creative technologists interested in complicating their aesthetic judgements around the futuristic. Gimmicks can also be understood as objects that seem either too late, e.g. old-fashioned, or too early, e.g. too futuristic. A lot of the reactive aesthetic suspicion arising around AI slop, and tech-art hybridity in general, can be attested to by the temporal uncanniness built into the gimmick form. To slightly co-opt Ngai's favorable angling of the gimmick as an indispensable survival strategy under capitalism (everyone's gotta have a gimmick), I could say I'm doing the same with creative technology.
What is your next step as a multimedia artist? What new obsessions, collaborations, or cultural spaces are you hoping to explore in the future?
I’m working on extending Palimpsest in at least two directions: one as a collaborative tool for poets and writers and another as a minimal performance tool for readings. I’m interested in small independent galleries like Pop Gun whose organizers frame their emerging artists as exhibiting in tension with “the anxieties of career success.” I’m interested in diving into public AI as an infrastructure, speculative imaginings instantiated in interactive web art pieces, and destabilizing boundaries between art and product as attentional tides rise up to meet this moment of shift in our broader cultural narrative surrounding AI.