• Issue
  • Jan 01, 2023

One to Watch: Tammy Nguyen

Portrait of TAMMY NGUYEN. Photo by Annie Ling.

At the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia’s President Sukarno remarked that a storm of reawakening against colonial powers had swept the two continents. The ensuing historical demise of alternative, utopian futures formed the basis of Tammy Nguyen’s solo presentation “Freehold,” at the SEA Focus 2022 (1/15–23) fair in Singapore. In her four visually lush paintings, she imagined the Conference’s iconic post-independent leaders defending the tropical Forest City, a still-in-development, underpopulated tax-free Malaysian island at risk of financial collapse.