Biography & Contact

Photo by Tamara Blake Chapman

Xuân-Lam Nguyen (Nguyễn Xuân Lam)
B. 1993, Hanoi, Vietnam
xuanlam.nguyen@fulbrightmail.org

Xuân Lam is a multidisciplinary artist known for his breakthrough project, Folk Painting: The Remake, which revitalizes and reintroduces forgotten Vietnamese folk art to the new generation. Since 2016, when folk art was deeply unpopular and marginalized within local contemporary art institutions, he has championed folk paintings' significance while exploring their potential and relevance to present-day discourses. Drawing from personal history and archival material, Xuân Lam's work explores the intersection of critical fabulation and future possibilities to unsettle dominant art historical narratives. His current project engages with the ambivalent legacy of Orientalist photography from Indochina and the shifting afterlives of displaced cultural artifacts.

His practice fuses the methods of an archaeologist and a disc jockey—combining research-based inquiry with time and labor-intensive processes. In a postdigital world dominated by mechanical reproduction and the demand for immediacy, his work insists on slowness, tactility, and materiality. Smooth, hand-painted gradients interrupted by spontaneous pencil mark-making, dense patterns built from hundreds of screenprint layers, and analog glitches permeate the surface, embracing maximalism as a deliberate strategy of opacity.

Xuân Lam holds a bachelor's degree from Vietnam University of Fine Arts. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he earned a master's degree in Painting with concentration in Theory and History of Art and Design. His thesis project reexamined the trauma-centric narratives through which Vietnam has often been framed and pigeonholed, reconsidering them half a century after the end of the U.S.-Vietnam war.

His solo exhibition Rendezvous between the Old & the New was co-sponsored by the Vietnam National Museum of History and the Vietnamese Women’s Museum. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (Hanoi), the Vietnam Pavilion at World Expo 2020 (Dubai, UAE), 81 Leonard (NY), Eli Klein Gallery (NY), Hollis Taggart Gallery (NY), RISD Museum (Providence, RI) and has created several public art projects in Hanoi. Xuân Lam received first prize in the art competition commemorating 45 years of Vietnam–Germany diplomatic relations and the XVI edition of Giornata del Contemporaneo. In 2023, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands commissioned him to create a project marking the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and Vietnam. In 2024, the French Development Agency commissioned him to create a public artwork as a gift from France for the inauguration of Hanoi Metro Line 3. Xuân Lam's work is held in the art collections of the German, Italian, and Dutch embassies, as well as the National Assembly of Vietnam.

Download CV