TAMMY NGUYEN
TIMAEUS AND THE NATIONS
OCTOBER
20, 2024 —JANUARY 19, 2025
Multidisciplinary artist Tammy Nguyen is known for her richly layered, research-based works that merge figurative imagery, abstract forms, tropical vegetation, and symbolic motifs. Through a blend of macro and micro perspectives, both abstract and figurative, Nguyen’s art invites viewers to navigate through fractured historical and cultural narratives alongside philosophical reflections deeply embedded in her work. Her paintings, embroidered tapestries, and artist book in this exhibition reward close observation, as their densely packed symbols and imagery reveal complex, thought-provoking iconographies (systems of visual meaning). Across all mediums, Nguyen’s intellectual approach seamlessly integrates disparate themes from ancient and modern sources, allowing multiple ideas to unfold simultaneously in the form of
fragmented components swirling and moving through the visual space. The effect is a cohesive visual language that resonates with meaning.
Regarding the main themes underpinning Timaeus and the Nations, Nguyen states:
My new body of work explores the creation of the universe and the pursuit for world order, drawing inspiration from Plato’s Timaeus and referencing the culture of flags of convenience. Plato’s dialogue explains the universe’s formation through various processes such as geometric logic, reasoning, and faith. These notions of world order are present in the exhibition and are further explored through an examination and deconstruction of the flags of convenience— an agreement among over 40 countries that allows merchant ships to register under any of these nations and fly their flag.
While Nguyen’s interest in Platonic ideas is longstanding, her latest body of work puts particular emphasis on the Demiurge, the divine craftsman in Timaeus, who created the world using mathematical and geometric forms such as fractals, circles, and triangles. These shapes, along with emblematic symbols from the 46 flags of convenience, recur throughout her
works, reflecting the divine logic that underpins her artistic expression. This order is juxtaposed against the chaotic, densely layered surfaces of her compositions, evoking the tension between human constructs and the forces of nature.
Through this lens, Nguyen offers a profound exploration of 21st-century geopolitics and the fragile balance between control and disorder, stability and instability of the world order.
2:4:8, A book about the forming and
flowing of nations
An Artist Book as the Crucible of Nguyen’s Ideas
Nguyen’s remarkable artist book, 2:4:8, A book about the forming and flowing of nations, serves as a central vessel for her ideation process, the site where her complex, multitudinous concepts and sources of inspiration interact. Her large-scale, ornate paintings often germinate from the ideas explored in all their intellectual complexity within the artist book, expanding its rich visual and semantic motifs into a broader visual field where imagery takes over from ideas.
2:4:8 is meticulously crafted from handmarbled mulberry paper on a wooden backing,
printed in red with black numerals. It takes its form from a vintage sewing pattern for a U.S. naval officer’s frock coat—a strikingly novel choice, through which Nguyen reimagines the Demiurge, the divine craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus not as a person, but as a navy uniform. Nguyen explains: “The book is tailored to mimic the logic in Timaeus using ratios and algebraic splitting. The pattern began as a small diagram, but by inserting measurements into blank variables, the pattern multiplied into something much larger, much like how the world forms in Timaeus.” In the frontispiece, she also writes, “2:4:8 refers to the intervals of progression in the creation of the soul in Plato’s Timaeus. The other numbers throughout this book: 4, 3, and 9 are all part of other ratios, 4:3 and 9:8, which also contribute to the creation of the soul.”
The book unfolds in three sections, corresponding to the original sewing pattern: an arm, a torso, and a skirt, which allow it to open in three ways. Its exquisite interior is interspersed with 46 national anthems, legal documents concerning flags of convenience (excerpted from the 1959 dispute hearing before the world court) and quotations from Timaeus. These legal texts and anthems, the sources of her intellectual inspirations, remain unaltered, preserving their original integrity
while juxtaposed with Nguyen’s layered imageries. The marbled papers are intricately adorned with swirling fractal patterns, emblematic shapes such as stars, ships, insects, and freight vessels, blended with calligraphic handwriting, musical notations, and abstract marks—created with a range of materials and techniques, including her handmade stamps and stencils.
Viewers can further explore the richly layered narrative of 2:4:8 by delving into its sumptuous pages beneath the striking blue cover. Through a QR code in the gallery or the exhibition webpage, they can engage with the book’s intricate interior. The narrative shifts between historical fact concerning geopolitics and poetic visual interpretation, inviting contemplation of world order, leadership, nationhood, and the construction of identity through symbols.
2:4:8, with its visual wonder and textual density, encapsulates the philosophical questions at the core of Nguyen’s oeuvre: the arbitrary construction of national identity, its seeming restructuring happening as seen in the maritime trade agreements, and the chaos that underlies our seemingly ordered reality.
Nguyen’s Paintings: Leaders, Rebels, and Imagining of the World Order, Past and Future
Nguyen’s paintings encourage viewers to step back and appreciate the overall composition before moving closer to uncover the intricate details hidden within the ornate surfaces. Each work presents a spectrum of figures in positions of leadership, ranging from statesmen to pirates, as she reimagines the Demiurge, who shapes the physical world through reason, faith, and mathematical principles, particularly those of algebraic divisions and proportion. In this new series, all painted this year, larger-thanlife caricatures of leader figures emerge from vibrant, lush foliage and colorful abstraction, their forms entangled with a dynamic natural world: Colin Powell in Craftsmen of Our Fate, Queen Elizabeth in Mother!, Manuel Zelaya, former president of Honduras in With Rarest Juices, Guard Her, a man from a maritime workers conference in It is the Pillar, and pirates drawn from popular culture in All Hail! God’s Command! and At Last, the Sublime Day Dawns. Their forms are entangled with the natural world, symbolizing the interplay between human power and nature’s uncontrollable forces.
By choosing leaders and rebels connected to sea power and maritime trade, Nguyen aligns these figures with the Demiurge’s role in crafting order out of chaos, grounding ancient Greek philosophical ideas within a modern political context. Nguyen refrains from making explicit moral judgments, however. Instead, she offers a nuanced portrayal that invites reflection on the complex dialectic between power, order, disruption, and chaos, all within the constant state of “becoming,” an important concept in Plato’s Timaeus.
As in her artist book 2:4:8, Nguyen’s paintings are replete with minute details and repeated abstract markings, incorporating emblems and symbolic motifs drawn from the 46 flags of convenience. These motifs reference maritime and naval activities, with intricate fractals made up of recurring patterns and shapes such as stars and fleurs-de-lis, alongside pirate ships and freight vessels—all woven into the compositions. These meticulously crafted details, as the saying goes, “hold the devil,” and in Nguyen’s work, they serve as key elements in unraveling Nguyen’s exploration of global power and order, examined through the dual lens of Plato’s Timaeus and the legal ambiguities of flags of convenience. The interplay between stars, fractals, flag symbols,
and numerals drawn from Plato’s text creates a series of visual paradoxes. Fractals, symbolizing the Platonic pursuit of an elegant world order and the concept of “becoming,” represent growth, movement, and the Demiurge’s mathematical logic. This sense of continuous evolution is mirrored in Nguyen’s depictions of spiraling plants, animals, and swirling insects. In contrast, pirate and freight ships—bearing their respective flags—disrupt this natural order as they traverse these worlds, competing and destabilizing the systems they seek to join. As Nguyen explains, the stars “reference both the celestial sky and the peoples of a nation, collapsing the ideas of environmental and social order.” Through these rich visual allegories, Nguyen delves into the complex dynamics of global systems, power, and disruption.
23 Embroidered Tapestries Titled Revolutions of the Same and the Other
Another recurring motif throughout Nguyen’s work, including 2:4:8 and her paintings, is the integration of musical notations and lyrics excerpted from the national anthems of the 46 nations historically involved in the flags of convenience system. This theme is further explored in her 23 embroidered tapestries,
marking a fresh foray into textile art for the artist.
Designed to hang like scrolls, each tapestry is divided into three sections. The top and bottom sections are embroidered with colors, symbols, and patterns drawn from two flags of convenience—representing nations that have participated, and continue to participate, in this mercantile maritime practice. Echoing her fascination with fractals as representations of the Demiurge’s mathematical logic, Nguyen embroiders them in fractalized patterns instead of solid colors. Emblematic designs— patterned stars, suns, moons, flora, fauna, guns, and crowns—are also stitched, illustrating the entanglement of power, identity, and history in these nations. These reconstructed national flags frame the central portion of the tapestry, where Nguyen features a three-line haiku, composed by blending of two nations’ anthems. After crafting the haiku, Nguyen matches corresponding musical notes from the anthems to the excerpted words, forming a new pastiche composition, which is stitched below the haiku. The result is a single poetic and sonic composition that blends two national anthems into one.
Expanding her multidisciplinary practice,
Nguyen transforms the tapestries into auditory experiences as well as visual ones. She has recorded piano pieces based on these embroidered works. Viewers can listen to the recordings performed by Nguyen, via QR codes embedded in the exhibition, adding a sensory dimension to the experience. The lyrics can even be sung at the same time. Nguyen explains the process:
Musical phrases from each national anthem have been extracted and translated into haikus. These haikus are paired, blending two nations into one. Each poem follows the 5-7-5 syllabic structure, offering a total of 17 syllables per stanza. I then transform the haikus back into music, creating a new anthem for a nameless nation.The 17 syllables become 17 notes, spread across 4 measures in 4/4 time signature. Within this structure, the 17 notes must be assigned rhythm which will allow for them to fit into 16 beats of music. An odd set of numbers fitting into an even numbered framework presents a seamless contradiction where something seemingly out of place can appear as though it was always meant to be.
Scan the QR code or visit our website to view the Flags of Convenience with the anthems of the 46 nations.
This experiment probes the limits of a world order and questions the notions of perfection in Timaeus. Through this process, Nguyen subverts traditional symbols of national identity, creating pseudo-anthems, rendering them “nationless” and challenging conventional ideas of statehood. These new musical phrases and their corresponding tapestries blur the lines between nations, suggesting the fluidity and constructed nature of borders and identities, much like the system of flags of convenience itself.
Visual Feast for Food for Thought
Nguyen’s work, from her paintings to her tapestries, is a marvel of dense imagery layered with intellectual depth and visual complexity. What begins as a captivating visual feast soon unfolds into a critical exploration of philosophical and conceptual ideas, offering not only aesthetic pleasure but also lasting food for thought.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator, Sarasota Art Museum.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from:
Judy and Fred Fiala
Charlotte and John Suhler
Gerald and Sondra Biller
Huisking Foundation
Audrey and Walter Stewart
Special thanks to Lehmann Maupin Gallery
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