art space . exhibition space . cafe
art space . exhibition space . cafe
Catching Faces
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November 2, 2025
October 4, 2025
Nguyễn Như Huy
CURATORIAL ESSAY
In his works, Nguyen Nhu Huy demonstrates both wit and humor. We can see how, in his transition from curator/philosopher to artist, his works carry a strong sense of thought made visible. For human perception, the face has always been a crucial element. Through the face we express emotions, and by observing the subtle movements of others’ faces, we receive the information they convey. Psychologists argue that the brain’s mirror neurons are essential to human social development: when we see someone laugh, it triggers unconscious mimicry in our own facial muscles, bringing us joy; similarly, watching someone cry can evoke empathy and compassion.
The entertainment industry is a practitioner of mirror neurons, but different cultural contexts shape facial codes in distinct ways. In Asian film and television, crying has become an entertainment process in itself. Whether in soap operas, family dramas, comedies, or tragedies, actors often end up crying together, stirring emotional resonance in the audience. This is both a culture of crying and an entertainment of crying. Nguyen Nhu Huy precisely captures this cultural phenomenon, employing a Stephen Chow–style satire that compels us to confront face after face.
Beyond the weeping actors, Face 01, the artist also presents his own face in Face 02, mechanically twisting as the toy cars moving disorderly under the silk screen on which the artist face is screened. This self-performative representation carries multiple layers of metaphor. Yet to me, it may also serve as a symbolic narrative of Homo sapiens evolving into Homo technicus. On one hand, globalization compels us to reimagine contemporary Asian narratives; on the other, as humans, we must continually renegotiate our place within new technologies. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan suggested, media and technological interfaces are extensions of the human body and organs. The face, being our foremost interface with the world, raises the question: how does this extension become a new mode of representation?
Since the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, I have sought to examine the relationship between Asian futurism, contemporary Asia, and Asia’s past. I found that in techno-orientalism, technology is often overstated in Hollywood’s discourse, to the point that the human subject disappears. In contrast, Asian film and television exaggerate faces so overwhelmingly that technology seems to have no place in the human-centered world. Nguyen Nhu Huy’s artistic experiments expose the absurdity of this tension and weave it into a coherent structure. What is even more valuable is that the artist avoids lengthy polemics, instead engaging in a powerful dialectic through his images.
Nobuo Takamori
ARTWORKS
GALLERY
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION:
Face No.1
Nguyen Nhu Huy’s Face 01 is an extraordinary single - channel video that foregrounds the face as both medium and cultural symbol. The work presents a series of actors—among them the celebrated Vietnamese actress Như Quỳnh—each revealing nothing but their faces while enacting the act of crying. What emerges is not simply a study of performance, but an exploration of crying as a gesture that exceeds its own action.
In the context of Asian television drama, crying has long been codified as a core element of entertainment, a calculated means of eliciting audience response. Here, however, it is reconfigured into an assemblage that is at once abstract and satirical: abstract, in its stripping away of narrative to isolate a pure affective sign; satirical, in its reflection on and critique of the melodramatic conventions of Asian storytelling.
By focusing the faces in this way, Nguyen underscores its role as a cultural vessel—an interface where emotion, identity, and social expectation converge. Yet precisely because of this cultural weight, the face is also revealed to be less a site of authentic expression than a surface transformed into symbol, abstracted from the very emotions it purports to convey.
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Face No.2
Building upon his sustained engagement with the motif of the face, Nguyen Nhu Huy’s Face 02 turns inward, using his own face as the work’s central material. The artist projects his face onto a fabric screen, which becomes a thin interfaceto manipulation by toy cars moving behind it. As these small machines traverse the surface, the projected features are pressed, warped, and reshaped—transforming the artist’s face into an unstable image. At moments, it takes on the comic exaggeration of a clown; at others, it recalls the convulsions of an involuntary spasm, hovering between humor and unease.
This dynamic of distortion resonates with the tradition of Stephen Chow’s comedies, in which pain and comedy coexist within a single gesture. But in Nguyen’s work, the scene is not only playful video. It became a metaphor for the conditions of contemporary life, where the pressures of technological innovation and industrial transformation bend and reconfigure both human identity and the artist’s own position within society.
Face 02 thus stages a complex interplay: the mechanical and the human, the humorous and the agonizing, the personal and the collective. The work renders the face as neither a stable surface of selfhood nor a transparent index of emotion, but as a site of continual negotiation—caught between embodiment and abstraction, agency and subjection. In doing so, Nguyen extends his inquiry into the face as a cultural vessel, revealing its fragility and its capacity to mirror broader shifts in the world around it.