Background
2025, Tammy Nguyen, To This Sweet Land.
Photo by Daniel Kukla.
Tammy Nguyen creates lush paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, and zines that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. A storyteller, Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice spans fine art and publishing, embodied through her imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press.
In the spirit of Nguyen’s maximalist approach to painting, Timaeus and The Teacher weaves together disparate subjects to examine the moral complexities that shape global history. Partially biographical (The Teacher is loosely based on Nguyen’s father), the work is also a meditation on worldmaking. In both content and structure, it references Plato’s Timaeus, a theory of the construction of the universe in which the Greek philosopher postulates that music is the cosmos’ purest expression.
Click here to learn more about Tammy and her practice.
Installation view of Tammy Nguyen: Timaeus and the Nations at Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida, 2024. Photo by Ryan Gamma.
2025, Tammy Nguyen, Cameroon and Bahamas.
Photo by Ryan Gamma.
Timaeus and The Teacher evolves from Nguyen’s body of work, Timaeus and the Nations, which explores the global maritime practice known as “Flags of Convenience,” through which ship owners can pay to register their vessels under the flag of a different nation to take advantage of more favorable tax and labor regulations. Forty-six nations make their flags available within this system, many of them former colonies, further suggesting the entanglements that shape today’s geopolitics and the freedom, or lack thereof, to move through the world.
With this body of work, Nguyen began a process of fractalizing the flags and anthems of these nations, using a mathematical contradiction borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus (a philosophy on the cosmic order) to recombine these elements into new patterns and forms. Through this system, the anthems of states are dismantled and recombined, just as the borders between nations are blurred at sea.
Timaeus and The Teacher uses the same logic of pattern making to create the opera’s libretto, extending Nguyen’s work to the world of the stage. There, The Teacher and his companions drift through an unstable terrain, where freedom is both promised and deferred, and where the order of the cosmos collides with the messy politics of human borders.
Click here to learn more about Timaeus and the Nations.