Fingernails, karaoke YouTubers, grass jelly, make-up tutorials, and anti-war anthems all find themselves colliding in the work of artist Diane Severin Nguyen. Mixing and matching disparate elements, Nguyen creates lush photographs and videos that question the divides between trashy and intellectual, organic and fake, alienating and intimate. Mirroring the visual abundance of its subject’s artworks, this short film is a portrait of a uniquely wide-ranging photographer and filmmaker as she works in her Lower East Side studio.

Crucial for Nguyen’s work is our contemporary experience of social media and the Internet. Its endless production of images and text is both a massive archive for her to draw from and a creative model for generating a new, open-ended visual language. In her video works “Tyrant Star” (2019) and “If Revolution Is A Sickness” (2021), Nguyen appropriates, remixes and synthesizes disparate cultural materials like Vietnamese folk poetry, anti-war anthems, and “K-Pop” music to mine what is discovered in their difference.

Another kind of creative alchemy happens in her studio where the artist choreographs ephemeral processes like burning and everyday substances like styrofoam to make her enigmatic photographs. Intentionally obscuring the identity of her subject materials is core to the artist’s larger project. Says Nguyen, “I try to work against that impulse to identify and get more towards a place of feeling…The moment that you speak or communicate, there’s already mediation. There’s something that’s about intimacy that is actually more important than knowing.”