Nguyen’s investigations into extinction, culture and consumerism began when the artist came across an article on Vietnam’s last Javan rhino, found dead after a poacher hacked off its horn. Rhino horn is wrongly believed to have special properties in traditional Chinese medicine, and is now a luxury product. Nguyen captures the tragedy of such misguided superstition in The Wrath of Imagination (2018), a beautifully embroidered rendering of Albrecht Dürer’s 1515 rhinoceros woodcut, which inaccurately depicts the animal as a scaly, armored beast. Vietnamese script embroidered above the image recounts a fictional meeting between a hunter and a rhino shortly before its death, who tells the man that he was “an artist who drew a rhino from his imagination and since has kept reincarnating as a rhino.” We may smirk at past folly, Nguyen seems to say, but the human imagination has always been precariously balanced between the wondrous and the monstrous. 

The paradoxical extremes of idolatry and slaughter that characterize humanity’s relationship to animals is encapsulated in The Irony of Our Worship / The Revolutionary Reincarnated As A Pangolin (2017), an installation in the style of a Vietnamese ancestral shrine with pink, plastic flowers and shiny trinkets galore, illuminated by garish LEDs and neon. A figure of a pangolin—endangered due to demand for its meat and scales, which in China and Vietnam are a delicacy, also believed to cure ailments—stands stoically on the plinth, clutching a red poster emblazoned with the words “death before extinction” in Vietnamese, a line that sits comfortably in the communist propaganda handbook but dips into absurdity coming from a pangolin imbibed with the revolutionary spirit. Reading Irony in dialogue with The Warning (2017), a storefront LED sign playing a looped conversation between a pangolin, a dragon and an emotionally vulnerable rhino, we begin to see Nguyen’s analysis of the connection between worship and consumerism take shape. Using tacky visual cues that one would see on a typical high street, he points out the dangers of characterizing this culturally-rooted desire for “magical” animal parts as anything other than base consumption: insofar as these beliefs and practices satisfy our need for fulfillment, prosperity and salvation, then they are also a form of consumption, taken to a literal extreme in the context of eating other creatures to extinction.