“Water Street by Night”
Melissa Nguyen
2 Mar → 27 Apr 2024
Melissa Nguyen (Vic) presents a new, print-based painting in the West Space Window.
Water Street by Night is explores Vietnam’s relationship with replication and mechanical reproduction through methods of appropriation.
With source imagery from the Vietnamese Cabaret Show, Paris by Night, the work uses bootleg aesthetics as a filter to consider notions of Orientalism and Western perceptions, diasporic cultural experiences, and personal nostalgia.
Read Today I am alive, and without nostalgia the night flows by Annabel Brown.
In 2023, Melissa was a West Space artist-in-residence, awarded a fully subsidised studio as part of our partnership with Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).
Melissa Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian artist in Naarm/Melbourne. Melissa has a painting-based practice interested in ideas of translation as creative methodology. The idea of artifice constitutes both her subject matter and process, lending itself to notions of translation, wherein every act in the painting process is relational, influenced and mediated by one’s perception of the subject.