“Water Street by Night”
Melissa Nguyen
2 Mar → 27 Apr 2024

Melissa Nguyen, 'Water Street by Night', 2023.

Melissa Nguyen presents a new, print-based painting in the West Space Window. Water Street by Night is explores Vietnam’s relationship with replication and mechanical reproduction through methods of appropriation.

With source imagery from the Vietnamese Cabaret Show, Paris by Night, the work uses bootleg aesthetics as a filter to consider notions of Orientalism and Western perceptions, diasporic cultural experiences, and personal nostalgia.

Read Today I am alive, and without nostalgia the night flows by Annabel Brown.

In 2023, Melissa was the inaugural West Space artist-in-residence, awarded a fully subsidised studio as part of our partnership with Melbourne University's Victorian College of the Arts.The West Space Window is supported by City of Yarra through their Annual Arts Grants Program.

A smiling woman stands in front of her artwork on display in the West Space window. The artwork is a pink faded ink transfer of a woman in many scenes. The artist is smiling and looking at the camera
A large pink artwork is on display in the west space window gallery. The window is surrounded by red bricks
A woman in a shirt, pants and handbag stands in front of a large pink painting in the west space window
A close up detail on a pink artwork containing a woman holding her shoulder. The image is faded from an image transfer process.
An external shot of West Space including an installation view of work in the west space window
A smiling Melissa Nguyen stands in front of her installation in the west space window gallery. In the window is a large pink artwork made from several perfume transfers on to canvas. Melissa is wearing a brown off the shoulder top and long brown skirt

Melissa Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian artist in Naarm/Melbourne. Melissa has a painting-based practice interested in ideas of translation as creative methodology. The idea of artifice constitutes both her subject matter and process, lending itself to notions of translation, wherein every act in the painting process is relational, influenced and mediated by one’s perception of the subject.