Thương / Nhớ is a textile installation by Vietnamese-American artist Phượng-Duyên Hải Nguyễn. Translated to English to mean Loving / Remembering, the work evokes these two complicated human actions through dreamy fragility and Nguyễn’s four two-hour in-person performances that activated the piece. In the middle of the gallery, delicate hand-sewn textiles hang from the ceiling above an architectural drawing painted on the floor. Nearby sits a heavy, foot-powered sewing machine and chair, providing a solid counterpoint to the gauzelike panels. The textiles consist of neon green, deep pink, aquamarine, and other vibrantly colored threads crisscrossed together, mirroring the look of loosely crocheted string. They recreate in physical space the small rooms, short hallways, and entryways the blueprint lays out. Bits of yarn and fabric are weaved into the threadbare grids here and there. As light as veils, the panels sway as the visitor walks through their rooms and corridors. The makeshift walls levitate, not quite reaching the ground and anchored to the ceiling by long pieces of transparent fishing line.
As you move through the diaphanous fabric, it catches light like a net. The fibers shine in places. Among them are slivers and patches of clear, almost plastic-looking, material. Nguyễn’s creation process involves sewing these inexact grids onto a water-soluble interfacing which she then rinses off. This makes most of the interfacing disappear, but she purposefully leaves behind the clear superstructure that makes the integrity of the grids possible.
Thương / Nhớ becomes a visual metaphor for all the invisible forces—gravitational, electrical, magnetic—that undergird the material world. But Nguyễn is also making a parallel to the internal forces of lived, human experiences: thương (to love) and nhớ (to miss, to remember), as well as her specific immigration experience. In the accompanying gallery guide, a small riso-printed booklet designed like a vocabulary list or dictionary, Nguyễn defines words that detail her family’s immigration story in entries such as Alien (I became an alien on Thanksgiving Day, 2006), Home (Home is multiplicable, mutable), and Nước, which she writes is a Vietnamese word that means both water and country. One sees this fluidity of language reflected in Thương / Nhớ’s thin sewn strands that vanish into each other as the eye flicks just a centimeter forward or backward. Nguyễn’s entry for Machine, Sewing begins, “I sew. I sew as a way to think, to process, to meditate, to (re)build. I sew because my mother sewed.” The power of lineage becomes the almost invisible structure that supports the panels’ brightly colored lattice.
Four times in the show, Nguyễn performs the construction of the textiles. She sews, an act she calls a form of care and healing, on the sewing machine adjacent to the hanging work. She intuitively patterns, back and forth, across and down, the thread into the burlap-like interfacing on a Singer—the same model her mother operated. She washes the finished textiles, letting most of the interfacing disintegrate until it is translucent. In these performances, Nguyễn plays the role of time. She is the agent that sets the machine in motion—a little sister chasing an older sibling down the hallway of a childhood home—and she is the agent that years later washes most everything away—the feel of the floor under little feet, the day of the week, why they were running in the first place.
Nguyễn ends her gallery guide with the following statement, “I find comfort existing within the blurry, abstract, metaphorical spaces.” Thương / Nhớ is a representation of how memories come to exist, how memories of home might comfort and blur over time, how homes change and endure.
Thương / Nhớ is on view at Visible Records in Charlottesville, Virginia through February 21, 2026.
