Detail of The Artist's Mother?

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The Artist’s Mother? interrogates how diasporic subjects are constructed and consumed by Western audiences. The woman in this image resembles Nguyen’s mother yet is entirely fabricated – a fictional memory made tangible. Both the photograph and the figure it depicts exist in states of displacement: misplaced within archives, severed from cultural origins, unmoored from fixed place. The work employs Nguyen’s invented technique of ‘perfume printing’, using fragrance as a release agent to transfer printed ink onto silk. The fragility of paper ensures imperfect translation and manual labour leaves idiosyncrasies, accidental marks, and deliberate flaws. These imperfections manufacture authenticity; the degraded surface falsely ages the image, situating it in a past when this fictional mother might have been young. Perfume notes embed themselves in the silk fibres. Over time the scent dissipates, leaving only trace – the memory of something sweet or the ghost of presence. Like diaspore itself, the work preserves what fades: identity as construct, memory as performance, belonging as a perpetual question mark.