Ocean Vuong
PROJECT
Writer, professor and photographer Ocean Vuong first picked up a camera in 2006, after being asked to document a friend’s punk shows. He returned to photography three years later, when he spent a day photographing his mother’s nail salon. In this display, Vuong interlaces these images with images taken with his brother fifteen years later, following their mother’s death. The vibrant atmosphere of the nail salon contrasts with the later, more reflective moments. Together, the photographs create what Vuong describes as a ‘time accordion’, mimetic of how memory operates through interruptions, hauntings and myths, ‘but also as things that leach through the imagined borders we make of years’.
ABOUT
Ocean Vuong was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 1988 and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, in a working-class Vietnamese American family. He graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature from Brooklyn College and received his MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he currently serves as a professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program.
Vuong is the author of bestselling novels On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, 2019, and The Emperor of Gladness, 2025, as well as acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016, and Time is a Mother, 2022. He has presented his photography in group exhibitions including From Asia to the World: Ancient to Contemporary Art at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (US), and Musafiri: of Travellers and Guests at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (Germany). His first solo exhibition, Sống, opened at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in Kingston, New York, in 2026 and his first solo museum exhibition, I’m Sorry I Love You, will open as part of the storied MATRIX series at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in August 2026.
Among his many accolades, Vuong has won the American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize, was nominee for the National Book Award, and is a recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant. In 2025 he was selected by Time as one of the ‘world’s most influential rising stars’.