Midnight Sonata

Alex Nguyễn-Vó's new series builds on Colonial Beach (2017), a body of painting and sculpture that used humor to skewer tableaus of reverie, intoxicated tourists sprawled across beachfronts and resorts. Nearly a decade later, Nguyễn-Vó turns to the subcultures of Asian America, in cities like Houston and Los Angeles, where youth culture and car culture converge. The humor remains, but it's harder-edged now: comic timing aimed at something closer to grief. His paintings pull from cinematic references ranging from Rob Cohen’s Fast and Furious (2001) to Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984).

If the work engages cinema, and the Vietnamese figure in places like Texas, it raises a pointed absence that the paintings seem to interrogate. Films of the French New Wave and of '68 often centered the Vietnamese figure as a political symbol: subject and victim of a war fought elsewhere, legible from a distance. What's striking is how quickly that figure recedes from view once it stops being distant: once it becomes a refugee, resettled in Texas or California. A symbol turned neighbor. These questions surface at the margins of the paintings rather than their center, cinematic in visual grammar, sardonic in its gaze on a subject that cinema itself let vanish. 

Drifting, as a technique, is a controlled crash, a discipline of risk performed just shy of collision. Nguyễn-Vó captures its lean, the physics of a body and a machine testing the edge of failure together, and reads in that gesture a portrait of masculinity as gamble: pride staked on precision, on the narrow margin between mastery and wreck. The wager is always calculated; the most minute steer is a surrender to the possibility of a crash. The American dream is one way into this. But underneath the swagger, the series is really about the disenchantment and failure of ascendant class mobility––a promise that, like the drift itself, was always a controlled loss of control.

That loss plays out in the palette: dark, melancholic, cut by headlights drifting through an unlit road at night, as if the culture were vanishing in the rearview even as it's painted. The Asian American subject, here, is rendered not as arrived, but as permanently in transit, unclaimed, indebted. And even vanished.

– Tiffany Sia