Uñas (2026)
Medium: Photo series
The Ryder is a contemporary art gallery founded in London in 2015 and now based in Madrid.
Curatorial statement: Uñas (nails) is a group show that brings together international artists united around a shared subject: the nail, selected as a motif in its bringing together of several interconnected domains of contemporary theory: gendered forms of labor, aesthetics and economy, animal-human hybridity, and the body amplifications afforded by queer(ing) technologies, whether camera, sculpture, or painted composition. The nail becomes a floating signifier through which to contextualize a diversity of practices, methodologies, and approaches to corporeal representation
. . . The circulation of aesthetic symbols through online worlds emerges . . . in the photographs of Vinh Mai Nguyen (b. 1998, USA), a media artist based in Brooklyn, New York. This series, developed over the course of 2023, is a product of the artist’s research into digitality, consumerism, and the “girl” as a transferable aesthetic. Developing 3-D printed nail sculptures in the context of their research at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, they invited friends to fashion such symbols as prosthetics that indicate Preciadian conceptions of the technologized-corporeal continuum. In their words, relayed in the online conference mecha mecha mecha: Agency, Nails, and AI as wannabe Girl: “Nails provide a look into the limits of our bodies. At the same time, they bring to life endless new bodily possibilities that challenge strict binaries between body and environment, beauty and ugliness, and us and others.”
Curators: Carmen Lael Hines and Roberto Majano
Photo credits: Roberto Ruiz
Exhibition catalog: link
Palimpsest (2025)
Medium: Interactive website (HTML, CSS, Javascript)
Dimensions: Variable
Description: Palimpsest is an interactive, text-based web experience that seeks to capture the intimate and destabilizing act of reading in the digital age. It asks: What becomes of personal, meaningful writing when the boundaries between author and algorithm begin to blur?
The work draws on postmodernist literature, seminal research on machine learning’s pitfalls, and glitch feminism to explore how language drifts, fragments, and reforms when the boundaries between author and algorithm blur. Through behaviors like drifting letters , fog-like visual effects, and live speech-to-text overlays, the piece unsettles linear reading and invites users into a space of multiplicity and instability. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, Palimpsest functions as both artwork and prototype: a speculative tool for imagining what public, poetic AI infrastructures might feel like. It is designed for readers who have a complicated relationship with the screen — those caught between longing for the solitude of books and the constant pull of digital attention.
Visit the piece here
Surface Tension (2024)
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Medium: Sculptural nail forms (3D printed + hand-built), documentation photography
Dimensions: Variable
Photo credits: Lingyi Li and Miya Sheker
Description: These nail sculptures explore the fingertip as a site of intimacy, labor, and cultural inscription. Informed by the aesthetics of care and adornment passed through Asian diasporic lineages, the work engages the body as interface—one that both connects and resists.
A quiet gesture toward how ornament becomes archive, and how survival becomes sculpture.
Medium: Sculptural nail forms (3D printed + hand-built), documentation photography
Dimensions: Variable
Photo credits: Lingyi Li and Miya Sheker
Description: These nail sculptures explore the fingertip as a site of intimacy, labor, and cultural inscription. Informed by the aesthetics of care and adornment passed through Asian diasporic lineages, the work engages the body as interface—one that both connects and resists.
A quiet gesture toward how ornament becomes archive, and how survival becomes sculpture.
Crawling Space (2023)
Medium: Gaussian Splat (Polycam)
Dimensions: Variable
Description: A family Mother’s Day crawfish boil 3D scan from 2021, rendered in 2023.
Young Boy Dancing Group (2023)
