Minh Ngoc Nguyen → Sour Sun

Sour Sun by Minh Ngọc Nguyễn operates as a vocabulary for his photographic work and offers a kaleidoscopic view of tricks and tinkering. Through the guise and semantics of commercial photography and contemporary still life, the book looks to examine shapes of consumerism, taste and fetishization through western visual touchstones of Southeast-Asian culture.

By utilising exaggerated scales, inverted colors, and photographic tropes, along with his fluency in Post-Internet and Southeast Asian visual cultures, the images attempt to re-constitute and dissect somewhat familiar objects.

The images attempt to maintain a lax dichotomy: the presence of superfluous and natural objects, accompanied by reckless artificial lightning, ultimately creating a personal reappropriation of the objects and symbols. These interventions are often created through the manipulation of still life arrangements - acting as agents, to subvert codified expectations of how the images are constructed and understood.

By restructuring the controlled parameters into a space of level playing field and imagination, Sour Sun also points to the ways in which images and visual media inscribe ideas of nationality and the desire for individual concession within photography.