Nguyen Thai Tuan is a painter whose work is deeply rooted in the history and politics of Vietnam. Nguyen's work is profoundly concerned with notions of memory, trauma, and the persistence of images. His paintings usually draw on actual events and real imagery, which he transforms and renders in ghostly, mysterious, and often monochromatic compositions. Nguyen's paintings toy with our perception of time and events by refusing to use pure colours, never representing his character's faces, and wilfully using effects that induce confusion. His visual language is structured around principles of duality and symmetry, between fullness and absence, appearing and fading, dream and reality, and personal and collective memories. His paintings question the structure and composition of a collective psyche and how it is, sometimes unconsciously, shaped by lingering images of societies' most violent realities.