Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by emerging, Los Angeles-based artist Christine Ngyuen. Nguyen's unique practice combines drawing with photography to create extraordinary, hidden worlds influenced by her personal memories, landscape imagery, and imagined visions. Using a variety of media and a series of photographic processes, Ngyuen creates fantastical, large-scale installations, engulfing the viewer into an otherworldly vortex that fluctuates between representation and abstraction.

Nguyen’s installations propose an ecoconscious atmosphere that often features imaginary creatures inhabiting a murky, sea-like environment made up of trees, flowers, ephemeral organisms, and crystalline particles. The co-inhabitants socialize, cross-pollinate information and distribute resources amongst their recycled community. For Art Basel Miami Beach 2007, Ngyuen has created a wall drawing inspired by a tree the artist saw on a recent trip to Vietnam. The drawing features a giant botanical-like squid swallowing a whale-shaped universe made up of bionetworks and miniature cities. Nguyen's multilayered structures speak of profound entities that exist outside the ecosphere of human discord and the mysterious ethers that seem to stretch from beyond earth's permeable atmosphere. Nguyen sets a panorama of nebular expanse, slippery time, and infinite spectral light that could be perceived only in the immeasurable depths of a dream void or through interstellar outer space.

Christine Ngyuen has been featured in solo exhibitions at UCLA Hammer Museum (2006) and 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles (2006). Group exhibitions include Uneasy Angel, Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Munich, (2007); Exquisite Crisis and Encounters, APA Institute, New York University (2007); Beyond Photography: Photography in Contemporary Art, Armory Center For the Arts Pasadena, CA (2007); Taste, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2007); and Oscene, Laguna Museum of Art, Laguna Beach, CA (2004). In 2006, Ngyuen received the first Contemporary Collectors of Orange County Fellowship and in 2005 received a Professional Artist Fellowship by the Public Corporation of the Arts, Long Beach.