Vân-Nhi Nguyễn: 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner

The photographs in Vân-Nhi Nguyễn’s series As You Grow Older show young people in Vietnam untethered from stereotype or category. “While Vietnam represents for many in the West a place where a war was fought or athletic shoes are made, its people bear witness to a richer and far more complex reality,” says Nguyễn, winner of the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize. “To expand and challenge the existing perception of Vietnamese people is to see and understand the unruliness of it all.” Nguyễn asks friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to pose for her, sometimes staging them in intimate settings such as their bedrooms. Three women strike a defiant pose in an apartment hallway, young men touch with tantalizing grace beneath a cobalt-blue sky, and a group picture shows the roughness of time on its surface. Combining her fascination with family albums and her concern for the way clothing and décor are rooted in cultural memory, Nguyễn creates scenes of intensity and mystery, and dramatizes the pressure between illusions of the past and, as she puts it, “happenings of the now.”

Vân-Nhi Nguyễn (born in Vietnam, 1999) lives and works between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

The Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to spotlight new talent in photography, identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition. Nguyễn’s work, chosen from more than one thousand submissions, is published with an essay by Thessaly La Force in the Summer 2023 issue of Aperture magazine.

The subjects pictured in Nguyễn’s photographs are: Tạ Lê Hạnh- Thơ, Vân Lê, Dan Ni, Thái Linh, Annica, Ronny Ackah, Vũ Khôi Nguyên, Bùi Nhật Minh, Jonathan Poirier, Vũ Thu Hương, Nguyễn Nhật Minh Châu, Nguyễn Hà Phong, Nguyễn Hà Thanh, Nguyễn Hiếu Ngọc, Hà Minh.

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