SARASOTA, FLA.- Tammy Nguyen debuts new paintings, embroidered tapestries and an artist book in “Timaeus and the Nations,” on view through Jan. 19, 2025 at Sarasota Art Museum. She is renowned for her densely layered, complex paintings that merge figures, abstract shapes, symbols and lush tropical vegetation. Her sculptural artist books, in turn, investigate the intricacies of her research-based approach to artmaking. The artist is deeply interested in colonial history, philosophy, semantics and in probing at ideas of moral ambiguity and confusion. With their beautiful, ornate surfaces and colors, these captivating works entice viewers into a web of entangled historical narratives.



In “Timaeus and the Nations,” Nguyen explores the making and unmaking of national identity, the pursuit of world order and the meaning of subjectivity in the 21st century. She draws inspiration from Plato’s “Timaeus,” one of the philosopher’s acclaimed dialogues, which considers the nature of the physical and human world. In this body of work, “Timaeus” serves as a metaphor for the geopolitical theater surrounding an international practice known as the flags of convenience, which permits shipowners to register their vessel with a country different from their own, thereby allowing them to take advantage of lower taxes or looser regulations. Plato’s foundational text underpinning Nguyen’s critical inquiries proposes that Demiurge—the divine craftsman central to “Timaeus”—created the cosmos, the physical world and its beings using mathematics, reason and faith. Through a lexicon of constantly evolving imagery, Nguyen interprets this process of creation as an endless cycle of splitting, exploring the notion of world order by merging “Timaeus” with the flags of convenience. Here, Demiurge’s logic of creation is demonstrated through fractals and musical notation, which ground Nguyen’s compositions across the paintings, tapestries and artist book.



“Nguyen is renowned for her powerful paintings that visually seduce viewers, inviting them to closely inspect and discover layers of figurative images, patterns and symbols that unexpectedly unsettle us and prompt a critical examination of colonial and imperial legacies and dictatorship,” explained Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum.



Nguyen’s paintings in the exhibition explore various ways to imagine the figure of Demiurge. In works like “Craftsman of Our Fate” (2024) and “At Last, the Sublime Day Dawns” (2024), historical statesmen and pirates represent different methods of diplomacy and statecraft. Nguyen’s paintings are densely layered with fractals made of patterned symbols—such as stars, hands and palm fronds — all extracted from the flags of convenience. As the fractals integrate with swirling animals, insects, vegetation, musical notations and symbols, they pursue elegance and strive for order.



A series of tapestries combine the 46 countries that have been or are currently participating in the flags of convenience. Each tapestry arbitrarily pairs two of these countries; from each pairing, Nguyen creates haikus by appropriating lyrics from the respective countries’ national anthems. To complicate the haikus and build further unity, Nguyen then takes the 17 syllables of each poem and revises them again—this time back into music. This process yields a key paradox. The 17 syllables are written into four measures of music with room for only 16 beats. By manipulating the rhythm of the notes so that an odd number fits into an even structure, Nguyen emphasizes the contradiction inherent in world order. Visitors will be able to see the flags, read the poems and scan a QR code to hear the music. Apparently seamless yet imbued with friction, these verses and melodies simultaneously distance viewers from the countries of origin while offering a new national proclamation.



Across the exhibition, the structure of music reflects the intervals by which Plato’s text describes the elements of the world splitting and transforming. Playing on this logic, an artist book titled “2:4:8” depicts a naval officer as a craftsman like Demiurge. Created from a vintage sewing pattern used to produce naval uniforms, the book’s diagrammatic pattern was rescaled using similar mathematics to music and fractals. The book’s marbled pages are interlaced with the original scores of the national anthems that appear in Nguyen’s tapestries, as well as with a 1959 legal document detailing an international dispute over the flags of convenience. As the pages turn, historical and poetic information moves in and out of focus. The naval uniform, as the basis of the book, continually opens to a new moment at sea, perpetually placing the statesman in front of nature—the world which he endlessly tries to conduct and command.



“Tammy Nguyen uses innovative techniques and blends mediums to create visually arresting works that help us discover lesser-known histories and see well-known images in new ways,” said Virginia Shearer, executive director of Sarasota Art Museum. “Our goal at Sarasota Art Museum is to bring our visitors pioneering artists who help us see the world anew—and ‘Timaeus and the Nations’ does just that.”

Nguyen is an assistant professor of art at Wesleyan University. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and is based in Easton, Connecticut. Nguyen is a recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2008, she received a Fulbright fellowship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam.



“Timaeus and the Nations” is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design and curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator at Sarasota Art Museum.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from Gerald and Sondra Biller.