Biography
Tam-Hien Vuong is currently based in San Antonio, TX. She received her BFA from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In her work, she explores the tension between recognition and the undefinable within shifting states of perception. Through painting, installation, and objects, she offers different ways to experience change. She has exhibited work in various venues in Houston and San Antonio, such as Pablo Gallery in Houston, Un Grito Gallery, San Antonio Art League, and SMARTS/1906 Gallery in San Antonio.
Artist Statement
My work explores flux as a state of living. Change exists across all things. Rather than understanding transformation as a singular event, I see it as a continuous state of becoming. Each work functions as its own performance of change, capturing moments where forms, perception, and meaning remain unstable. I pull from the tension of mundane phenomena such as reflection and refraction, and the residual impressions these experiences leave in the mind. I am interested in moments where perception becomes uncertain, distorted, fragmented, and emerges. In installations and objects, I recreate these sensations on a larger concentrated scale. Relying on slow exploration to fully experience the shifting of material and ways of seeing. In my paintings, lingering sensations emerge continuously, collapsing, obscuring, and resurfacing. The work relies on pareidolia to fill in information between imagery. Certain rendered areas act as temporary anchors before dissolving back into ambiguity. This slowed representation of continual change between recognition and uncertainty allows for disorientation, heightened senses, suspense, and searching all at once. Shifting interpretations mirror the nature of flux itself. No singular emotion or fixed reading can be sustained throughout the experience of my work because constant stability would contradict transformation altogether. Meaning continues to evolve perception changes, making the viewer an active participant within the work’s ongoing process of becoming.