Touch Recalled
Painting, 26cm x 41cm
Artwork Statement
My work explores the human body as a site where identity, memory, and emotion coexist in shifting, often contradictory states. The figures in these drawings are caught in moments of transition — folded inward, reaching outward, suspended between vulnerability and strength. Their gestures are neither fixed nor resolved; they occupy an in‑between space where the boundaries of self become fluid.Working with drawing, mixed media, and warm tonal washes, I focus on the subtle language of posture and touch. The body becomes a map of lived experience: tension held in the shoulders, quietness in a bowed head, resilience in the curve of a spine. These forms are not portraits of individuals but embodiments of emotional states — longing, introspection, protection, release.As a Vietnamese‑Australian artist shaped by migration and intergenerational memory, I am drawn to the ways identity is carried in the body. Diasporic life often exists between cultures, between histories, between who we were and who we are becoming. This sense of in‑betweeness echoes through the figures: they are present yet withdrawn, exposed yet shielded, grounded yet dissolving into the surrounding space.The works for In Between reflect my ongoing interest in how the body holds what cannot be spoken. Through line, shadow, and gesture, I trace the emotional thresholds we inhabit — the moments when we are neither one thing nor another, but something fluid, transitional, and deeply human.
Artist Bio
Khue Nguyen is a Vietnamese‑Australian artist based in Naarm/Melbourne whose practice centres on the human form, gesture, and the emotional states held within movement. Working through drawing, mixed media, and silk‑based processes, he explores how identity, memory, and lived experience are carried in the body. His figurative works often sit in the space between motion and stillness, revealing the fluid, shifting nature of selfhood and connection.
Khue’s practice also engages intergenerational narratives of migration and belonging, informed by his family’s artistic lineage and the complexities of diasporic life. In 2026, he will present Family Legacy, a major retrospective at the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts.
Across four decades of exhibitions and public art in Australia and internationally, Khue remains committed to accessible visual storytelling. He was a finalist in the Archibald Prize (2010) and has received multiple awards across Fine Arts and Graphic Art.
