Trọng Gia Nguyễn

Trọng Gia Nguyễn (b.1971 in Saigon, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese-American artist, writer, curator, and designer living and working between Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Brussels, Belgium.  His diverse body of works examines the fragility of personal history and structures of power in their myriad forms. Regularly employing humor while at other times engaging sober reflection, Trọng’s work elevates the condition of doubt as it reveals and disrupts the undercarriage of our most trusted spaces – domestic, cultural, political, and economical.

His scope of production includes everything from painting, to installation, film, sculpture, performances, web-based projects, and iPhone applications. Crossing over into design and fashion, he has collaborated with brands such as LA Loop, Be&D, Lacoste, and Valerie Barkowski.

Trong has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including Galerie Quynh (Ho Chi Minh City), Galerie Bao (Paris), La Patinoire Royale (Brussels), NON (Berlin), The Private Museum (Singapore), and Orange County Museum of Art (California), etc. His works are represented in notable private and public collections including Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, 21st Century Hotels, Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art, Servais Family Collection, Foundation CAB, and many others.

Trọng has received grants and residencies from Villa Empain / Boghossian Foundation (Brussels, Belgium), the Museum of Arts & Design (NY), Artist in Residence in the Everglades (FL), Gate 27 (Istanbul, Turkey), LegalArt Miami (FL), LMCC (NY), FabLab (CA), Harvestworks Digital Media Center (NY), Bronx Museum of the Arts (NY), Puffin Foundation (NJ), among others.

As a curator, Trọng has organized over 25 exhibitions at museums and galleries, including Boca Raton Museum of Art, Freies Museum Berlin, Residency Unlimited, Zabriskie Gallery, and many others. From 2005-07 he founded and directed New General Catalog, a gallery in Brooklyn that was devoted to showing experimental work by emerging and underserved artists. Upon moving to Ho Chi Minh City in 2015, he curated the inaugural exhibition at Vietnam’s first contemporary art center, The Factory.

Trọng has served on the advisory boards of organizations that include Fashion in Film Festival, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Florence Artist in Residence (FAiR). He has also guest-lectured and served on discussion panels at Art Stage Singapore, CUE Foundation (New York, USA), School of Visual Arts (New York, USA), Columbia University (New York, USA), Catalyst Foundation (Washington, DC, USA), Reykjavik Art Academy (Iceland), Riga Center for Contemporary Art (Latvia), Goethe Institut (Hanoi, Vietnam), and many others.

Trọng is currently working on a theater production about his family’s refugee story, titled The Leavers.