Hồng+Anh Nguyễn

I used to research as a student. Now I do it in the hours between a full-time job and the rest of my life.

Research is an art. A soft craft. A quiet ritual. Not the sterile kind you’re taught in school—full of rigid referencing and bibliographies in 11-point font—but the kind where you sit hunched over your desk at dusk, reading something half-relevant, and stumble upon a sentence that makes your stomach drop. That’s the magic part.

If your work is to have integrity, it must come from the inside. Everything you need to be creative you've probably possessed since you were ten years old. Just show up, regardless of the results, and scream down the well with every inch of your lungs. That’s how you get a career.

It is important to surround yourself with people who are better at stuff than you are. Never be the smartest person in the room. I never am.

The best way to find your voice is to make a lot of work and then destroy it.

There was something really satisfying about seeing garbage come into my studio, and then seeing it go back out—as garbage. That’s how I learned to trust my gut. There are no talent scouts. You are totally on your own. No one cares if you fuck up, believe me.

I just put idea... See more

But I think of it this way: I don’t make art. I make things . Framing it like that keeps what I’m doing from becoming precious. And that’s a good thing, because to be precious is to be timid—and that’s bad. Creativity requires attention to detail and persistence in the face of failure: that’s why it’s called a ‘discipline’. Every painting fails bef... See more

When I get blocked in my work, I just quit.

I used to think that the best thing to do when experiencing a painting block was to put my head down and try to push straight through.

Now I try to think of the word ‘block’ from a different angle. A colon gets blocked; an artist has dry spells. A dry spell is a good sign: it means you’re working. The only... See more