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