Confluence
The Branch Museum of Design proudly presents Confluence, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Vietnamese American artist Kenny Nguyen, on view September 10 – December 10 2025.
Confluence is rooted in the idea of different elements coming together—materials and histories merging into something new. The word itself means “the place where lines flow together,” and that meaning resonates deeply with Nguyen. He thinks about the rivers in his hometown in the Mekong Delta—how they meet, shift, and reshape the land around them. That geography has always stayed with him as a metaphor for transformation and the diasporic experience.
In his work, Nguyen uses hand-cut silk as both material and metaphor. Silk carries weight—it’s tied to cultural tradition and fragility—but through processes of layering and rearranging, he pushes it into sculptural forms that move across the wall. These pieces live between painting, sculpture, and textile. That in-between space is where Nguyen feels most at home—where boundaries blur and something hybrid emerges.
Nguyen’s background in fashion design continues to inform how he approaches structure and form. The way fabric behaves, how it drapes and contours—these tactile qualities are central to how he builds each piece. Nguyen is interested in how fashion, like art, can carry memory and identity, stitched together in ways both visible and invisible.
Confluence brings together not only threads of material, but also threads of memory, displacement, and reconstruction. It’s about the way things don’t just come together—they shift, resist, and eventually settle into new forms.
Thank You To Our Sponsors:
The Lewis Family
About The Artist:
Kenny Nguyen (b. 1990, Ben Tre Province, Vietnam) creates expansive, dimensional, mixed-media paintings that center on ideas of cultural identity, displacement and integration.
Nguyen grew up on a coconut farm in a rural area near the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. Despite having an established career in fashion design, he decided to join his family when they moved to the United States in 2010.
Acclimating to an American way of life proved uneasy at first, especially with a language barrier that intensified feelings of alienation and isolation. Nguyen turned to art-making as a coping mechanism and as a means to express himself in a more universal language. The transition from design to art was a natural one and in 2015 Nguyen earned a BFA in painting from the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and subsequently established a studio in Charlotte.
Drawing from his experience working with textiles, in particular, silk, a culturally significant material in Vietnam, Nguyen developed a distinctive technique to produce sensual, three-dimensional works that he describes as “deconstructed paintings.”
He begins by tearing swaths of silk fabric into hundreds of strips that he dips in acrylic paint and adheres to raw canvas. Methodically, almost meditatively, he repeats the process—tearing, painting, sanding, sewing, weaving, attaching, layering—until he has a structured but malleable medium, which he shapes into undulating, sculpted forms.
Nguyen’s paintings are often affixed to the wall with pushpins, allowing him the flexibility to rehang or adjust the composition as desired. The works can be stretched flat like a traditional canvas or gently draped, folded and creased into animated structures that unfurl along the wall and pool at the floor. Each installation is unique.
In some ways, Nguyen’s approach of deconstruction and reconstruction is akin to the experience of growing into his identity as Vietnamese American and as an artist. His use of silk, which remains the primary material in his practice, has evolved alongside him. Where he once chose it for its splendor and sense of familiarity, through a rigorous process of transformation, it now holds greater meaning for the artist: “For me, silk has become the connector tying both cultures together.”
Nguyen has participated in exhibitions across the globe, including at the Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul; CICA Museum (Czong Institute for Contemporary Art), Gimpo, Gyeonggi Province, Korea; Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf, Germany; LaGrange Art Museum, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Florida; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California; and The Rayburn House Office Building, United States Capitol Complex, Washington, DC. In 2024, Nguyen’s work was the subject of the solo exhibition Kenny Nguyen: Adaptations at the Mint Museum in Charlotte.
In 2016, Nguyen received the Excellence Asia Contemporary Young Artist Award from Sejong Museum of Art; in 2023, a nomination for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship; and in 2024, Asian Art in London’s Modern & Contemporary Art Award for a work from his Eruption series. He has been awarded numerous grants, fellowships and residencies.