Trọng Gia Nguyễn, Vietnamese Soup Cans from the series Perpetual Paintings, 2025, SketchUp file, output as double-sided archival prints on Hahnemühle hemp paper, 29,7 x 42 cm (each frame)
How to Waterboard a Tech Bro is Trọng Gia Nguyễn’s first solo exhibition in Paris. Bringing together several bodies of work, the artist reflects on today’s darkening age of willful ignorance and unchecked power – technological and socio-political alike. An era shaped by fraudulent algorithms, complicit politicians, greedy broligarchs, and conservative memelords and their cruel pawns.
In 2021 a flood in New York destroyed a significant portion of Trọng’s artworks and archives, a material loss that inspired Perpetual Paintings, a series that exists initially as SketchUp files stored publicly on Google’s 3D Warehouse. These digital “paintings,” ranging across many forms (including photography and sculpture), can be downloaded and produced as needed, scrutinizing ideas of supply and demand, rarity, and ownership. Nguyen regularly updates the files, thereby challenging the notion of a singular, definitive artwork, In Vietnamese Soups, a subset of Perpetual Paintings, Trọng reimagines Warhol’s iconic soup cans as Vietnamese varieties. Unlike the flatness of silkscreen prints, the VR files reveal each object in full 360 degrees. On their reverse sides, viewers encounter “poetic recipes” written by the artist, blending propaganda with subversion and dark humor. For this exhibition, Trọng prints one scene from the front and one from the back of a can, framing them together as a two-sided work. All files remain freely downloadable, reinforcing reproducibility as a central principle. The 3D Warehouse also becomes an unexpected archive, as Nguyen digitally reconstructs politically charged objects such as Breonna Taylor’s bullet-pierced clock and Jeffrey Epstein’s prison noose – presented here as a photograph and a painting, respectively. In an age of erasure and distortion, these files serve as inadvertent records, circulating each time they are viewed or downloaded.
A second series, The Diabolical, addresses justice and culpability more directly. These paintings reproduce height-line graphics sourced from police stations, movie posters, crime photos, and other cultural references. Installed at true-to-scale heights and painted the exact color of the walls they hang on, the paintings quietly “size up” the guilt quotient of each viewer, thus literally shifting power in favor of the artwork. Their raised lines and numbers remain visible through successive layers of paint, underscoring how justice persists even when suppressed.
At Galerie Bao, the works are splashed with garish colors that bleed underneath them, dribbling into provocative texts that cast both populism – and Pop art – as forces rarely associated with subtlety. Offering a playful respite, Win, Win presents a ping-pong table sliced in half and mounted against a mirror that completes the form through reflection. The viewer plays only against themselves, with no objective beyond competitive contemplation. The harlequin-patterned surface hints at wit (and wit’s end) tempered by melancholy, echoing the trickster figure from French folklore.
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