James Nguyen: Open Glossary

James Nguyen: Open Glossary is presented as part of the Copyright Agency Partnerships series of new commissions supporting mid-career and established visual artists to develop and present a major new body of work. With an ongoing commitment to collaborative models of making, James Nguyen has expanded the solo commissioning focus, working with Tamsen Hopkinson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Pāhauwera), Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung) and Chris Xu on a series of new polyphonic installations presented throughout ACCA’s galleries, as well as an evolving multilingual queer glossary for ACCA’s Digital Wing.

Open Glossary explores the capacity of language to both bind and divide us. Alert to the liveness of lexicons, the exhibition emphasises the ways that words and syntax constantly evolve and transform, marking our connections to others across the specifics of time and place. Conversation is key to Nguyen’s approach, positioning his personal experience and perspective in dialogue with others—family, friends, Vietnamese diasporic and LGBTIQA+ communities, the artworld and its institutions.

Open Glossary brings together three distinct projects that poetically repurpose everyday materials to reflect on the intimate dimensions of daily life, and their broader cultural and political ramifications. A sprawling installation fashioned from hundreds of donated white button-up shirts evokes a myriad of connotations, from business meetings and religious ceremonies, to queer protest tactics, the visual vocabulary of the Neo-Concrete Movement, and the artist’s own family textiles factory. This symbolically charged assemblage forms the backdrop to a collective multi-lingual translation project of queer terms and experiences for, and by, non-English speaking LGBTQIA+ community members.

Drawing on the formal language of painterly abstraction, an accompanying installation, Hui Hụi, creates a meeting space in which to reflect on longstanding linguistic, cultural and spiritual connections across Indo-Pacific and Moana Polynesian communities. A third project, Lerty’s Song, is a vibrant, hands-on making-space for young people to craft their own stories in relation to a range of pressing contemporary issues, including constitutional recognition for First Nations people, the Voice to Parliament and caring for Country. 

Open Glossary revels in multilingualism—the messiness, slippages and gaps that translation across linguistic and cultural contexts inevitably entails, along with the potential to strengthen understandings of ourselves and others by building vocabularies and relationships that bridge difference.

This project is presented in partnership with the Copyright Agency as part of the 2023 Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) series, supporting mid-career and established Australian visual artists to produce a major new commission.  The first in the series was TextaQueen’s Bollywouldn’t at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Haymarket gallery, Sydney 2022.