Thi My Lien Nguyen • Nguyễn Thị Mỹ Liên
Artist and Photographer
Thi My Lien Nguyen (b. 1995) is a Swiss artist and photographer of Vietnamese descent based in Winterthur, Switzerland. Her multidisciplinary practice is grounded in memory, materiality, and the poetics of diaspora. Drawing from her Vietnamese heritage and lived experience navigating cultural borders, she works with photography, printmaking, moving image, performance, writing, and (culinary) activations.
Food functions in her work both as medium and as site of inquiry — a space to negotiate questions of belonging, migration, and collective memory. Working increasingly with analog and alternative photographic processes, she proposes slowness, materiality, and embodied practice as forms of resistance to extraction and erasure. Her work moves between documentary and personal narrative, drawing on traditions, rituals, and folklore to tell stories that resist linear time.
Alongside her artistic practice, Nguyen is part of the curatorial team at Les Complices*, a self-organized off-space in Zurich creating platforms for queer, trans, inter, non-binary, women*, and BIPoC artists. Through (culinary) activations, workshops, and collaborative projects, Nguyen creates spaces of encounter grounded in care, solidarity, and mutual support.
Her work has been exhibited at Kunstmuseum Thurgau (2025), Athens Photo Festival (2024), the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil in São Paulo (2023), Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zürich (2023), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022), and Vincom Center for Contemporary Art, Hanoi (2021). She has completed residencies in London (2024) and Vietnam (2023), with upcoming residencies at MASEREEL (Belgium) and Ano Syros (Greece) in 2026.
Interests
contemporary photography
social (engaged) / community art
spaces
archives
practice of sharing
Vietnam and Switzerland
gatherings
zines
publishing
working and thinking around food
diaspora
rituals
traditions
folklore
love
postcolonialism
riso printing
alternative photographic processes
performances
communal practices
spirituality
poetry
lists
clouds
collages
꧁ talented friends and collaborators ꧂
Paloma Ayala
Kay Zhang
Engy Mohsen
tracy september
Raisa Durandi
Laura Gauch
Lien Pham
Christian Knöpfel
Helene Leuzinger
Cédrine Scheidig
Vanessa Drummond
Kate Lim
Severin Reusser
Dylan Wiedler
Janis Polar
Samuel Schalch
Siselabonga
3nam
We Do Good
RAAW coffee
SŌNSŌN collective
Gautschi Editions
Arnold Rahmenmanufaktur
VARY