Z.T. Nguyen: “Facts Are Bigger In The Dark”
Installation view, Z.T. Nguyễn: Facts Are Bigger in the Dark, island, New York, NY, 2025. Courtesy of island.
In a dimly lit restaurant in Sunset Park, Z.T. Nguyễn and I sit face to face. Plates are being set down and then quickly bussed all around us. Patrons are coming and going. Unmoved by it all, we stay for a while. We begin to discuss how examining the pain of loss can be a part of understanding oneself, but also how easy it is to be consumed by that pain instead. In the face of hurt or powerlessness, sometimes the only thing to hold onto is the quiet power of mundane, private choices. “Why do you think I’m always wearing a tank top?” he says. “You never know who you’re going to run into, and I want to look hot.” We pay our bill, then walk out. We embrace, then part ways. I feel better now.
Z.T. Nguyễn, Red Night, 2024, Acrylic and graphite on paper, 31.25 x 87.25 in. Courtesy of island.
Facts Are Bigger In The Dark is Z.T. Nguyễn’s first solo exhibition, on view at island (formerly Rubber Factory), located on the second floor of a walkup on the Bowery. The exhibition consists mostly of fragile works on paper that curl from the wall like bandages trying to stay latched to skin. Visible creases from repeated folding and unfolding mark the flesh-like, red-hued surfaces created with diluted acrylic paint.
There is an installation component as well. Watching (2025) consists of a hand-drawn empty chair statically playing on a CRT television. It is surrounded by pigmented liquor bottles and prescription pill cases, presumably pain medication. Facts Are Bigger In The Dark (2025) presents a found chair turned over with a letter-sized drawing of eyes fixed to its underside. The drawing is the only piece in the exhibition that is dyed with squid ink. Squid ink, which is materially extracted through fear, is chosen to imbue this feeling in a literal sense. These works transform the space into an aftermath scene of trepidation, pain, and the numbing of pain.
The chair image reappears for a third time in Home (2024), a thumb-sized drawing of an empty chair in a room facing dark night. The visual repetition between the installations and works on paper create an immersion where I find myself wondering, What intimate thing happened here?
Installation view, Z.T. Nguyễn: Facts Are Bigger in the Dark, island, New York, NY, 2025. Courtesy of island.
The exhibition takes its name from a line in Autobiography of Red (1998) by Anne Carson. In this poetic novel, the myth of Geryon, a red-winged monster, is reimagined as a modern-day gay teenage boy who grapples with love, trauma, and self-discovery. Similarly, Nguyễn’s pieces do not tell a linear narrative; instead, they unfold in fragments that mirror Carson’s lyrical and elliptical style. In this exhibition, Nguyễn becomes his own version of Geryon through vignettes such as city buildings, a black cat, pocket knives, a used mattress, and scenes of bedroom intimacies that coalesce into a personal mythology.
Self-portraits like Neck (2025) and Insectoid (2024) depict his body in a mythologized manner, with four arms and a contorted neck to emphasize that the myth reflects emotion and sensation rather than literal form. While the specifics of Nguyễn’s personal history remain obscured, his narrative is intimately felt rather than explicit. The nocturnal scenes evoke solitude, reflection, the quiet churn of desire, anxiety, and transformation. It defines the night as an incubator for what lingers on life’s horizon.
Installation view, Z.T. Nguyễn: Facts Are Bigger in the Dark, island, New York, NY, 2025. Courtesy of island.
Surprising references to Americana symbols characterize the work: blue jeans, pocket knives, and travel. Myths provide a symbolic structure for grappling with the unknowable, and here, Americana functions as a modern mythology. Nguyễn’s work disrupts classic American symbology entangled with the stoic, heterosexual, white male archetype. The lone figure against a desolate landscape is not a cishet white man, but a queer Vietnamese individual. Blue jeans become a site for erotic fantasy and wear. Pocket knives become a metaphor for survival and vulnerability. Here, travel isn’t a Manifest Destiny Dream; it’s a search for safety, desire, and belonging—a kind of mythic wandering longing for recognition rather than conquest.
Facts Are Bigger In The Dark lives on the edge between masculinity and softness, belonging and exile, vulnerability and assertion, obscurity and clarity. Within these dichotomies, Nguyễn examines how interpersonal power struggles and the private self are simultaneously connected and restricted. These tensions are reminiscent of the fundamental ones that exist within ourselves.
Z.T. Nguyễn, Hold Me, 2024, Acrylic and graphite on paper, 31.13 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Nguyễn’s private choices are ever present in the exhibition, whether we are made explicitly aware or not. This is, after all, his myth. In Hold Me (2024), Nguyễn’s severed head lies at the feet of his lover. The head is not dead, even though it is decapitated; he is alive and clearly sensorial. It illustrates a power struggle; his gaze looks upward, a vein protrudes from his neck. He appears to remain beholden to his lover while not losing a sense of self. What he reveals here is the complex feelings of social obligation with which we use to navigate personal relationships. It beckons the sentiment, Who are we if not for each other?
For most of my time at the gallery, I linger around Obey (2025). It is a single sentence on a letter-sized sheet of paper that reads, At some point, it was no longer an option that was even on the table, and I ended up just doing exactly whatever he told me to do. It sounds like it is extracted from a story, but is it the beginning or the end? Who knows. On its own, the sentence functions like an image—you must take it as it is. Here is Nguyễn’s poetic quest for intimacy laid bare. This is his quiet power: choosing surrender as a way to maintain what is precious to him. There’s something about transience that Nguyễn understands—the cyclical nature of pain that encompasses closeness, healing, and unhealing, the small intimacies we hold onto that aid our survival.
Z.T. Nguyễn: Facts Are Bigger in the Dark is on view at island from May 16 through July 12, 2025.
