Thai Nguyen has always considered himself an artist. He can’t remember a time where he wasn’t creating, but in recent years, his style has taken a drastic turn, and he says that art has “always been who I am, but I never felt like I became me until I started doing this art.” His current work is conceptualized around connecting dots into geometric shapes. It’s a departure from his earlier work of painting nudes and representations of objects or scenes. “I don’t know why, but I just like the idea of putting dots out there and connecting them and whatever happens, happens,” he says.
When Nguyen was 10, his family came to the United States as refugees from Vietnam. He didn’t speak English but excelled in math. He recalls finishing his math long before the rest of the students and spending the rest of the school day drawing. A teacher recognized his talent and bought him a sketch pad—“she probably wanted to give me something to be busy with,” he says.
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Nguyen never imagined that he would go into fine art, even after finishing art school. “As a refugee, we didn’t have any money, so having money was important to me.”
This led him to a career in design and an eventual job as an art director. He did this work until 2011 when he decided to stay at home with his two young daughters. Now that they’re in school, he splits his time between his art and his “dad job,” which begins at 7 a.m. when the girls get up for school each day.
His work is “like child’s play,” he says. He discovered it 13 months ago rather by accident. “I just started putting dots on paper and connecting them. It was freeing.”
Nguyen liked that he didn’t overthink the work as he had when he worked as a designer. He just let them evolve. “It’s like Picasso said it took him 50 years to learn how to paint like a child again,” he says. “It’s so true–when you look at kids, they don’t think about anything when they paint. They are just in bliss–they’re in the moment, and their work is amazing.”
Perhaps it’s this child-like feeling that fuels Nguyen’s work. He’s created over 4,000 images in the last year and keeps reconceptualizing his work in new ways.
He’s currently working on a series he calls “thirteen.” It’s based off 13 origin points. He picked the number because he prefers odd numbers and says there’s something “silly about superstitions. Thirteen always gets a bad rap, and I like the fact that he’s viewed as a bad guy.”
This 13 series will be composed of 113 different designs, all unique despite being originated from the same number of points, 13.
“I finally feel like I’m doing what I was meant to do,” he says. “I always thought that I wanted to be a successful artist, but now I feel like that’s not as important. The reward is the contentment I feel from doing the work.”
Nguyen’s work can be found at The Last Hotel through December, and he has a mural and 13 series paintings at Sushi Koi and Lux and Nyx window at The Fashion Fund.
