Phuong Nguyen Challenges Colonial Narratives at Art Gallery of Burlington

By: Maisha Hasan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Burlington Local-News.ca

 

Some of the most remarkable works in the Western world have been inspired by the East — though “inspired” may be too generous. In many cases, motifs and styles were taken, distorted, and repackaged under the sweep of 19th-century colonialism. 

 

Toronto-based artist Phuong Nguyen challenges that colonial narrative head-on.

 

In her exhibition, “she died a death by a thousand cuts,” on view now at the Art Gallery of Burlington until May 17, 2026, Nguyen reclaims the ornate language of so-called “chinoiserie” and transforms it into work that interrogates colonialism and questions ownership, objectification, and cultural memory.

 

Nguyen works primarily in oil painting and experimental weaving, often exploring themes of orientalism and her own connection to and understanding of it. During her recent residency at the Art Gallery of Burlington’s pottery studios, she expanded her practice into clay, creating sculptural components to frame her paintings. The result is a layered exhibition with an otherworldly quality, where painting, weaving, and ceramics intertwine as a quiet but deliberate act of resistance.

 

Nguyen speaks here about her AGB exhibition, her work, and the themes she explores. Interview has been edited for clarity.

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What first drew you to choiserie as a starting point?

 

I first got exposed to it while working at Casa Loma. It was made during a time when chinoiserie was a trending style. They have a room called the Chinese Room that’s dedicated to a chinoiserie design sensibility. What drew me to it was this interesting cultural filtering system of aesthetics and design. 

 

I was born and raised in Toronto, and I find myself carrying the same kind of “filtering system.” I have a secondhand understanding of what it means to be Southeast Asian or Vietnamese. Not only is it a secondhand understanding, but it’s also a very Western perspective. Chinoiserie was an entry point for me because I felt very similar to it. 

 

When I was younger, I had a limited understanding of my roots and heritage, which left a lot of blanks to be filled in. I [gravitated toward a] fantasy of the East, and what it could be. Now I’ve been to Asia and have a different understanding, [but] I still come with this Western perspective that I try to decentralize.

 

How do you rework a style with such a loaded history into something critical or subversive?

 

I’ve been negotiating these ideas about what beauty means under a Western and colonial gaze and [specifically] towards Asian and Southeast Asian femininity. 

 

Under colonialism, beauty can sometimes be perceived as an invitation to ownership and violence instead of something to be shared and celebrated. We can see this fetishization of Asian female bodies, this Western association with submissiveness, softness, and fragility — and how exoticism has resulted in violence against actual Southeast Asian women. That’s something that I would like to imply in my work, but not overtly. I am really quite interested in that.

 

Your pieces feature sprouting hands, blurred bodies, and drifting incense smoke. How did those visual elements emerge?

 

This has been a fascination for me for a long time. There’s a written work called Ornamentalism by Anne Cheng — I reference it a lot in my work. She talks about how an Asian female body, when objectified, can turn to this “object-person,” this in-betweenness. She calls it a “perihuman,” like an object that is human, but also object.

 

Certain objects, like vessels, ceramics, brocade and silk, evoke humanness because of their association with Asian female bodies. That undead-dead kind of human thing has been an interest of mine for a while. It is almost Frankenstein-esque. When I paint these objects, they seem alive, like they have a life or a history of their own. The hands appeared on their own one day, and they animate the object in a way. 

 

I’m also interested in incense specifically. Traditionally, at least in a Vietnamese context, incense is a way to communicate with those who have passed on; to pray for them, to send them our thoughts. I thought it was an interesting bridge that could communicate with these perihuman objects, with these humans that are objects.

 

Can you explain the significance of L’Art à Hué (a French colonial-era publication documenting Vietnamese art and architecture) and why it appears so centrally in your work?

 

In Orientalism by Edward Said, he talks about the idea of colonialism as an active role that’s imposed on a society, while also being an academic branch as well. Back then, there were these “Orientalist scholars,” and it was their job to study what they perceived as “East” at the time. The purpose of these academics was, whether they knew it or not, to justify the acts of colonialism through their academic writing and a scholarly lens. 

 

Art of Hue is one of those Orientalist pieces where they justify the ongoing colonialism of Southeast Asia, and Vietnam specifically. The frames around [my] paintings are meant, like that book, to “preserve” Vietnamese art, while also tearing it apart under a European lens.

 

The text talks about how Vietnamese artists are impotent and unable to give life to their artwork, which I find interesting because I play with [that theme] in my work. There are chapters on [motifs of] flowers, dragons, turtles, and bats in a very European way that rips them from their original context and organizes them by these categories that don’t fully embrace the complexities or the symbolism of the original work. The names of my pieces directly reference the printing plate in that book. 

 

Beyond those references, what did material sourcing look like for this exhibition?

 

I normally start off with the painting; I was trained as a painter, and it is a Western medium. 

 

In some of the pieces, I use this plastic twine that can be found in Chinatown; it’s a twine that’s found in a lot of immigrant households. My parents use it to wrap banana leaves around sticky rice to steam and cook. It’s also a symbol of migration and movement: you can see it at an airport — when travelling to certain places, [people] bring a giant cardboard box of things to bring overseas. It’s usually wrapped in this twine and layers of duct tape, and I have a lot of affection for it [the material]. 

 

When I was doing the weavings, I realized I needed something to hold them. That is when the wooden carvings came into the picture. I carved those myself, referencing the book [L’Art à Hué]. The ceramics were a result of my residency at the Art Gallery of Burlington; I was invited to be a part of a residency in their ceramic studios.

 

What did ceramics allow you to do that other mediums couldn’t?

 

It was a lot of exploring. I love learning how to work with different materials, and the ceramics evoked the subject of the painting. I liked that there was a painting of ceramics, and there are actual ceramics around it as well. In an Asian context, it’s very female-coded. 

 

This collection speaks to repair and colonialism. What does “repair” mean within your practice?

 

The idea of repair — I don’t know if that’s fully achievable. 

 

I think about the history of repair, but more so the idea of change and moving forward. My work always gets compared to kintsugi, the Japanese craft where they mend pieces with gold. But I’m not really interested in repairing things back to how they used to be, more so expanding the idea of what it could be.

 

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Phuong Nguyen’s “she died a death by a thousand cuts” is on view at the Art Gallery of Burlington until May 17, 2026. More information can be found on the gallery’s website.