Kiều-Anh Nguyễn
My manager will continue to update after his floating
one Eternailty later
Interactive installation
Dimensions variable
Acrylic nails, lacquer, alluvia
daadgalerie, Berlin, DE
2024
“During the course of five days from May 29 to June 2nd, Kiều-Anh invites visitors to let her copy their nails into lacquerworks. The performance results in objects in the shape of human nails in various stages of realization, drawing comparison between the performance of beauty care, the aestheticization of the human body and art making.
This equation cuts across several layers simultaneously. Starting from a personal background, the myth of “doing nail care in Germany and getting rich” connects to childhood memories of the artist. At the same time, she is confronting possible expectations towards Vietnamese artists to represent nail salons as a form of social, ethnic, economic and political critique related to the history and present of migration from Vietnam to Germany. Kiều-Anh’s enactment of a lacquer workshop in Berlin also reminds us of other histories of relations between former East and former West, for example the migration of art and beauty concepts and products from Asia to Europe, of admiration and colonization, of eroticising and exoticising. In her performance as a service at daadgalerie, the artist proposes to deal with these troubled histories and relations by stretching and repeating into eternity the operations of painting and scraping, forever undoing her artworks.”
text by Nguyễn Quốc Thành
photo by Eunice Maurice
See also: adaptations of this work in Taiwan and Malaysia