Tammy Nguyen Drags Dante Into the 21st Century

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 251, ‘Afterlife’

In his 1984 translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Allen Mandelbaum renders line 79 of Canto 16 in Paradise as: ‘All mankind’s institutions, of every sort/have their own death.’ A century earlier, in 1867, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated those same words as, ‘All things of yours have their mortality.’ While in 2007, Robert and Jean Hollander gave the line as, ‘All your concerns are mortal, even as are you.’ The written word endures only as long as its reproductions, yet its meanings live and die. Channelling past and present, every translation is effectively both a séance and a vibe check.

For the past two years, artist Tammy Nguyen has been translating the Divine Comedy into ‘A Comedy of Mortals’ (2023–25), a series of three exhibitions across Lehmann Maupin’s Seoul, London and New York spaces. The works reorient the poet’s allegorical travels: in the second show, ‘Purgatorio’ (Purgatory), for example, Nguyen depicted a descent into Indonesia’s Grasberg Mine, among the world’s largest reserves of gold and copper. SOS – These Are Gold-Containing Copper Ore (2024), a collage-like work on paper, is filled with Dantesque allusions to the geo-political context around the mine – newspaper clippings about the 1955 Bandung Conference, the African Asian multinational meeting of states for establishing decolonial solidarity; textbook entries on the geological history of Indonesia; Dutch colonial-era stamp impressions – reimagining Dante’s indeterminate purgatory as a space for both extraction and uprising.

This winter, I visited Nguyen at her farm in Easton, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and two children, and where she’s set up her studio in an old, airy barn. She was at work on the final iteration of the trilogy, ‘Paradiso’ (Paradise), which opens this month. ‘I want the surface to seem intrinsic to the body of the painting,’ she says of these latest works, which, like earlier pieces, also contain an array of references: former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower making his farewell address, rendered in painted profile with hand-stamped quotes; eagles, a symbol of justice given voice in Dante’s Paradiso but also a loaded image representing American patriotism; and other icons with evolving cultural significance, like the Virgin Mary and Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy. Meanings stretch by the images’ proximity – as does the paper, quite literally, as the layers sink in. ‘I get really excited when the paintings become porous to ever-more references,’ the artist tells me. ‘I keep adding them, which I find helpful because I’m kind of drawn to everything.’

Nguyen’s literariness is perhaps best expressed by way of her artist books. As part of ‘Purgatorio’, for instance, she exhibited Mine, Purgatory (2024), a stack of hand-made paper boxes containing albums of images and texts from the Divine Comedy and the Bandung Conference. These papers – some translucent, marbled and glittered – are as various as Nguyen’s references and are often made after extensive workshopping by the artist. It’s the sort of project you would see released by her artists’ book press, Passenger Pigeon Press. Subscription series like ‘Martha’s Quarterly’ offer readers four handmade books a year – such as the most recent volume tackling PLU codes, pesticides and Cartesian anxiety.

Most recently, as part of her ‘Collaborations’ series, Nguyen published OPM+ Archive with Les the DJ (2024), which at the time of writing is sold out. The Archive finds Nguyen joining forces with the Washington D.C.-based and Caloocan City-raised Les Talusan, or Les the DJ, and reimagining the artist book as a record crate. The cardboard box, which resembles vinyl record mailers, houses paper reproductions of sleeves from Les’s vast collection of seven-inch singles from the Original Pilipino Music movement, which began in the 1970s as a vibrant and stylistically voracious font of pop music made by and for Filipinos. The paper is cut as flexagons, allowing you to push and pull the record sleeves and glimpse new combinations – a sort-of remix in the same vein as Nguyen’s collage-like paintings.

After hours of engaging conversation, she and I had barely even begun to examine a work on parchment that riffs on illuminated manuscripts, or the largest work in the show, Love Justice, You Rulers of the Earth (2025), which incorporates Frankenstein’s monster and Dante within a canvas that’s exactly the size of a nuclear bomb. ‘My fantasy is always that there’s a very flat surface, but so many layers that you’re able to really dive in. Like a portal,’ she tells me. Or perhaps, like a poem.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 251 with the headline ‘Mortal Concerns’

Tammy Nguyen’s ‘A Comedy for Mortals: Paradisio’ is on view at Lehmann Maupin New York, from 5 June until 15 August

^{Main image: Tammy Nguyen, When Bitten By Fleas (detail), 2023, watercolour, vinyl paint, pastel, screen printing, rubber stamping and metal leaf on paper stretched over wood, 122 × 178 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York/Seoul/London; photograph: Daniel Kukla}