Sceneries of Myth: In Conversation with Anh Nguyen
Anh Nguyen, Bánh Tét, 2025. Digital image, courtesy of artist.
Nearly a decade after leaving her family and home in Saigon to attend school in the United States, Brooklyn-based photographer Anh Nguyen began her photographic project, The Kitchen God Series. Creating a world that playfully moves between investigation and staged imagery, fiction and documentary, Nguyen examines how she and her friends, a younger generation of Vietnamese people in New York City, integrate tradition into their own lives abroad.
The series’s title references the popular Vietnamese folklore of the kitchen gods—three gods said to inhabit the home of every family, watching over to ensure that members are treated well and that the home is in order. Adopting the gaze of a kitchen god herself, Nguyen uses interventions afforded to photography to transform intimate portraits of her and her friends and still lives of their homes into performative, otherworldly retellings.
Through her evenly lit images, Nguyen explores her evolving cultural identity, the interpretive nature of myth, and what it can look like when traditions transform through different generations. In this interview, the photographer discusses her role as an observer and interpreter, her recent work with the Magnum Foundation, and how she uses myth and iconography to find meaning within her work.
Anh Nguyen, Self Portrait (Bitter Melon), 2024. Digital image, courtesy of artist.
Samantha Jensen: One thing I love about your work is that despite coming from a classic documentary background, you don’t allow your work to be confined by the photographic binaries often imposed on us—it sits in the liminal space between documentary work and fine art. Was this a conscious decision in The Kitchen God Series or did it happen naturally?
Anh Nguyen: For a while, I was grappling with whether this is documentary, or because I’m staging it, if it could still be considered that. But we know there’s no one truth in photography, so you can’t have a non-biased viewpoint in a single photograph.
The idea came from my desire to photograph my Vietnamese friends in New York. Many come from a similar background to mine—we had the autonomy and the choice to move away from home and start a new life somewhere else.
This is very different from the narrative of Vietnamese immigrants in the US in the past—a large portion came after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and there wasn’t a lot of choice for them. I was interested in exploring how my generation does have that choice. The ways that we carry on our traditions and maintain a relationship to our culture are very different from this older generation of Vietnamese Americans.
Because I knew the people I was photographing so well, I felt I couldn't do it in a way that was objective. It was difficult to hide my own biases in it. Every photograph I made, I was projecting myself into it. It made me so aware of my presence behind the camera, which connected to the idea of the kitchen gods always watching over. I’m not superstitious about it, but it’s a beautiful lens to view culture. When I was photographing people in their homes, I realized that it was taking on this role of observing and interpreting what I saw.
SJ: The way you use flash in your images lays things out in an apparent, unconcealed way. This feeling of being observed—as the kitchen god does or as you did when you photographed your friends—is that where the stylistic choice of creating highly exposed images comes from?
AN: Right. I think for some people, the way to portray intimacy or secrecy is through concealing things, but for me, having the lighting be even and laying the image out flat were somehow more mysterious. In showing all of one single detail, it conceals all that’s around it. When I lean into the idea of photographing from the kitchen god perspective, they would be trying to tell you what they’re seeing. They would be straightforward with it.
Anh Nguyen, Quail Eggs, 2024. Digital image, courtesy of artist.
SJ: Does every image have a myth involved in it?
AN: Some images are directly inspired by myth and are staged to represent a specific memory or story. But most images begin with me noticing objects in my friends’ homes, and those items would inspire me to think of stories I could recreate as an image. For example, the egg image. I had wanted to use these quail eggs I got from a Vietnamese supermarket in an unexpected setting. After I took the photograph, I thought about the myth that could accompany it.
SJ: Which myth is that?
AN: The origin story of the Vietnamese people is that we were born from a hundred eggs. There was a fairy from the mountains and a dragon king from the sea. They fell in love and had a hundred babies that were born from eggs. They realized that they couldn't live together, so the mountain fairy took 50 of them up to the mountains, and the dragon king took 50 of them to the sea. That’s how the Vietnamese people were born—separated from the start, but sharing the same origin. It’s also what the project that I’m working on right now gets into.
SJ: Can you speak to your work in the Magnum Foundation Fellowship?
AN: Yes, last spring I received the Magnum Foundation Fellowship to do a project I proposed about the Vietnamese American community in New York. This year is the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, and really the beginning of when Vietnamese people began migrating to the US and abroad. Last winter, I was photographing a Lunar New Year event in Queens. I was expecting it to be very familiar, but it felt very different—it was something I’d never seen before. The Vietnamese American community here is largely people who left Saigon after 1975, when Vietnam reunified.
My family is from the north, but I was born and grew up in the south. I never learned in depth about this divide. It’s been kind of tricky, navigating something that I can’t understand or necessarily align with, but ultimately, what I do understand is the fact that across generations, we’re all trying to interpret Vietnamese culture and traditions in our own ways.
In this context, the origin myth of Vietnamese people for me symbolizes the story of migration. Taking to the sea is also very symbolic of Vietnamese immigration in the US, so in this new work, in these celebrations or in how people identify with culture, I am trying to find how the sceneries of myth show up.
Anh Nguyen, Ông Địa (Earth God), 2025. Digital image, courtesy of artist.
SJ: So are the myths different? Do they have different traditions?
AN: No, and maybe that’s part of what’s so appealing about it. You can be from the same culture, nation, ethnicity, whatever, and be so different politically, but myth is so apolitical or so otherworldly. These stories aren’t passed down to be lessons in politics, but rather as a way of thinking, a way of imagining the Vietnamese people reuniting. This work started strictly as a documentary, and I had no expectations other than to understand an additional aspect of what it means to be Vietnamese. Naturally, it morphed. I realized I need a myth to relate it to; I need to identify iconographies in order to find meaning in the photos.
SJ: To return to The Kitchen God Series for a second, Gathering (2024) is an image of your friends sitting around a table, each looking up at the camera. It feels like a moment you’ve walked in on, perhaps unannounced. How does performance play a role in this work?
AN: In that image, we were celebrating Lunar New Year, and I had taken other, much more natural photographs that night. None of them felt the same because they didn’t have the element of being staged or intentional. It felt too real. There was no gaze to it. The important part of Gathering is the eye contact—the feeling that you walked into a room you weren’t supposed to be in. It’s confrontational.
Anh Nguyen, Gathering, 2024. Digital image, courtesy of artist.
SJ: It goes back to that dialogue between the observed and the observer. You’re observing, or the kitchen god is observing, or maybe the younger generation is observing and thinking about the traditions or how they play a role in their life now. Do you try to capture this balance?
AN: By working on this, it became clear that the images with people in them need to have direct eye contact. The gaze is important because it’s about young people asserting something. It shows they are certain about themselves and what they value if they are able to maintain that eye contact. There are things one feels aren’t in line with the traditional values that our parents have, but it’s important to me to show that both can exist. I do value these traditions, and I can also have these things I identify with that feel uniquely modern.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anh Nguyen, Offering Table, 2024. Digital image, courtesy of artist.
