Trong Gia Nguyen installation at PULSE Miami Beach by mc2gallery (Booth N – 211). Image courtesy of PULSE Miami Beach.
Trong Gia Nguyen Wins the Miami Beach 2015 PULSE Prize
December 3, 2015, Miami Beach, FL – PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is pleased to announce Trong Gia Nguyen as the winner of the 2015 Miami Beach PULSE Prize. This jury-awarded cash grant has been given directly to an artist of distinction exhibiting within a solo presentation booth at every biannual edition of PULSE since 2006.
Milan-based mc2gallery presented Nguyen’s work as an environment that challenges the traditional relationship between art and viewer. The immersive installation includes a saloon door silhouetting a lynching scene. Viewers enter through this macabre portal into a disjointed domestic space. The “interactive” sculptures disrupt the viewer’s sense of stability as the eye searches for meaning within all the displacement. “My work is concerned with structures of power as they relate to the process of looking at art. It’s a wrestling match in which the viewer can never win,” says Nguyen.
The multi-disciplinary artist lives between Brooklyn, New York and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Trong Gia Nguyen’s work has been exhibited internationally extensively. He has received grants and residencies from the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Artist in Residence in the Everglades, Cannonball Miami, the Foundation of Contemporary Arts and others.
Nguyen’s installation was selected by a jury of leading art experts including Don Baciagalupi, Director, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; Casey Fremont, Executive Director, Art Production Fund; Sarah Harrelson, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Cultured Magazine; and Deborah Willis, PhD., Chair, Department of Photography and Imaging, NYU Tisch School of the Art.
The nominees for the 2015 Miami Beach Prize included Scott Anderson (CES Gallery), Srijon Chowdhury (Klowden Mann), Richard Garrison (robert henry contemporary), Henry Hudson (TJ Boulting), Ronnie Hughes (Rubicon Projects), Christopher Kochs (Black & White Gallery), Nancy Lorenz (Morgan Lehman), Cristina Córdova (Ferrin Contemporary), Christian Maychack (Gregory Lind Gallery), Nino Mustica (Scaramouche), Helen O’Leary (Lesley Heller Workspace), Trong Gia Nguyen (mc2gallery), Mariu Palacios (Cecilia Gonzalez Arte Contemporaneo), Andrew Salgado (Beers Contemporary), Adam Straus (Nohra Haime Gallery), Grace Weaver (Thierry Goldberg Gallery), andWinter/Hörbelt (Galerie Heike Strelow).
Nguyen joins a list of notable past winners including, most recently, Miami-based Elisabeth Condon whose bold, colorful, mixed-media works were presented by Emerson Dorsch at PULSE New York 2015.
ABOUT PULSE CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR
Founded in 2005, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is an established part of the annual art calendar with editions in New York and Miami Beach. The fair is recognized for providing its international community of emerging and established galleries with a dynamic platform for connecting with a global audience. PULSE offers visitors an engaging environment in which to discover and collect the most compelling contemporary art being produced today. For further information about PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, please visit www.pulse-art.com.
SAVE THE DATE: PULSE New York | March 3–6, 2016
The Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011
FOLLOW US: @PULSEArtFair
JOIN IN THE CONVERSATION: #PULSEArtFair
Up Close With Sam 