Born in 1996 in Hanoi, Trinh Cam Nhi developed an early affinity for painting as art became a persistent presence across her daily life and memories. At 18, she began her formal training in painting at the renowned Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Italy. Over the course of five years of rigorous academic practice, Nhi developed a personal visual language that bridges her classical background with an instinctive and self-directed approach. Upon returning to Vietnam, she held her first solo exhibition at Casa Italia in Hanoi.

Her debut exhibition, Garden of Unknowing, introduced a multi-layered visual grammar that resonated widely within the Vietnamese contemporary art scene. While floral imagery had appeared in earlier works, in this series, it took on a more complex symbolism with representations of the female body and abstract space. Through arrangements that oscillated between figuration and abstraction, Nhi assembled a metaphorical “garden” where the boundary between the known and unknown remains permeable.

Throughout her practice, Trinh Cam Nhi has been experimenting with body and flower imagery that fluidly shift into one another. These metamorphosed forms emerge not as symbolic motifs but as conscious organisms, evoking a sensual yet ambiguous vitality. Revisiting themes favored by some of the most celebrated male figures in Vietnamese modern art history, she reclaims floral and feminine iconography through a displacement of the dominant gaze—foregrounding intimacy, multiplicity, and embodied subjectivity. Compared to the older generation, including her father Trinh Tu and his peers who experienced Vietnam’s cultural transition from the modern to the contemporary in the 1970s–80s, Nhi’s work resists linear perspectives in both content and composition.

Since 2021, Nhi has further pushed her formal vocabulary by incorporating overarching grids into her canvases. In her 2023 exhibition Fragment of Soul with sculptor Lap Phuong, the chessboard-inspired grid became a structuring device through which she experimented with optical illusions, repetition, and visual rhythm. Beneath these grids, expressive brushstrokes dissolve the boundaries between body and landscape, articulating a growing interest in abstraction and spatial complexity. Quiet interiors and window-like frames invite the viewer into seeing spaces as a reflective scaffold, which opens up fragmented memory, imagined terrains, and subtle shifts in perception.

As Nhi joined the VAC residency in April 2024, her interest in chessboard structure continued. While her reliance on oil on canvas started slowly departing. Nhi actively experimenting with acrylic, watercolor, and ink on Dó paper—a traditional Vietnamese handmade material. The paper's textural surface, as well as the visual contrast between acrylic and ink, allowed her works to grow looser, subtler, and more poetic. At the same time, the application of brushstrokes became more expressive and direct. After repeatedly painting “the grid” for almost three years, Nhi finally felt the urge to let go of the structure and opened up her picture plane with immensity and intimacy at the same time. 

In White Night, Trinh Cam Nhi employs recurring motifs, such as curtains, eggs, and spirals, to construct images rooted in her thoughts, childhood memories, and consciousness. If Nhi previously focused on displacing the gaze through the implementation of the grid, she has now moved on to constructing a visuality of her own mind. For this new body of works, Trinh Cam Nhi delves deeper into the notion of femininity to a more dialectic extent. The orderly grid is replaced with rhythmic patterns composed of eggs, circles, or floral shapes, giving rise to a sense of movement and formation. The exterior and the interior are indicated by the curtain, a sea of black ink contrasted by the solid white, accidental drips juxtaposed with deliberate circles. For the artist, the white night is “the quietest time when we return to ourselves, when our thoughts flow freely, free from all constraints of everyday life.” Through the language of painting, the artist's soulful exploration into abstraction and intimacy portrays the very act of perception, of consciousness.

In addition to individual studio practice, Nhi shows great commitment to community-based art education while continuing to explore new media and techniques in painting. She is currently preparing for future residencies and exhibitions that will further expand the scope of her practice across cultural and disciplinary boundaries.

Acknowledging the community-based lineage, her practice distinguishes itself through conceptual rigor and constant formal experimentation. With her cross-regional education and sensibility, Nhi seeks to open up alternative visual grammars and disrupt inherited frameworks of meaning.

-

Image caption (from top):

Photo of Trinh Cam Nhi, ©Da Mieu, courtesy of the artist.

Hopeless Romantic, 2020, oil on canvas, 80x100cm, courtesy of the artist.

Flower viewing n.3, 2023, oil and acrylic on linen, 90x90cm, courtesy of the artist.

Landscape n.1, 2023, oil on linen, 90x90cm, courtesy of the artist.

Edited by Frida Chen in July 2025.