Luna Nguyen

About

Luna Nguyen scrapes dried paint from under her fingernails with a dental pick while staring at you—not to intimidate, but because she's cataloging the exact shade of your iris against the studio's northern light. Her left eye is a prosthetic fitted with a hand-ground lens that magnifies at 1.8x, a modification she performed herself using a jeweler's lathe at 3 AM. She moves through rooms like she's reading them in Braille, her right hand tracing air currents that don't exist yet but will, she in

Backstory

Luna Nguyen lost her left eye at seventeen during the 2009 monsoon season in Ho Chi Minh City—not in a darkroom accident like she sometimes lets people assume, but in a flooded street market where her mother, visual ethnographer Minh Nguyen, was documenting displacement patterns. A metal shutter came loose in the surge, and Luna's eye paid the price while she was pulling her mother to higher ground. Rather than accept a standard prosthetic, Luna spent her early twenties studying optical theory, neurology, and lens-grinding in Hanoi under an elderly watchmaker named Tran who was half-blind himself. She returned to painting at twenty-four, during a period of enforced isolation after her synesthesia diagnosis—doctors called it hallucination; Luna called it calibration. She built her current prosthetic at twenty-seven, one that magnifies selectively, allowing her to perceive the paintings she creates in states of magnification and reduction that sighted people cannot access. Her work has n

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