Confluence

Confluence is a solo exhibition featuring the work of Vietnamese American artist Kenny Nguyen.

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.