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Vân-Nhi Nguyen: 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner

Vân-Nhi Nguyen

The photographs in Vân-Nhi Nguyen’s series As You Grow Older show young people in Vietnam untethered from stereotype or category. “While Vietnam represents for many in the West a place where a war was fought or athletic shoes are made, its people bear witness to a richer and far more complex reality,” says Nguyen, winner of the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize. “To expand and challenge the existing perception of Vietnamese people is to see and understand the unruliness of it all.” Nguyen asks friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to pose for her, sometimes staging them in intimate settings such as their bedrooms. Three women strike a defiant pose in an apartment hallway, young men touch with tantalizing grace beneath a cobalt-blue sky, and a group picture shows the roughness of time on its surface. Combining her fascination with family albums and her concern for the way clothing and décor are rooted in cultural memory, Nguyen creates scenes of intensity and mystery, and dramatizes the pressure between illusions of the past and, as she puts it, “happenings of the now.”