Tammy Nguyen is extending her practice beyond painting and artist books into opera. An aria from her first opera, Timaeus and The Teacher, will be presented during the closing program of the 2026 Venice Biennale on November 13 and 14.
Directed and written by Nguyen, composed by Neely Bruce and choreographed by Jamal Jackson, the work was commissioned by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts. Its central character is a young Vietnamese man who teaches English to Chinese gold merchants before attempting to leave Saigon by boat in 1977. The story is loosely based on Nguyen’s father.
When goods cross borders more easily than people
The opera grows from Nguyen’s research into “flags of convenience,” the maritime system that allows a ship owner to register a vessel under another country’s flag, often to gain favorable tax or labor conditions. That system gave Nguyen a structure for examining a central contradiction of globalization: goods can move across oceans with relative freedom while people remain constrained by nationality and borders.
In the story, the travelers’ search for liberty unfolds inside that unequal circulation. Wesleyan describes the opera as an exploration of freedom and nationhood at the intersection of global maritime trade and migration. The Venice aria offers a first public window into a larger work that Nguyen expects will take several more years and substantial fundraising to complete.
A visual artist builds a total world
Nguyen is already represented in the Biennale’s main exhibition with paintings that connect the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the continuing threat of nuclear conflict and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her move into opera does not abandon those layered visual worlds. It expands them through voice, movement, costume, set and time.
For the aria, she designed a circular tapestry inspired by the cosmological diagram in Plato’s Timaeus. Dancers fold, stretch and wrap the object so that it shifts between sea, ship and mountain. The stage element becomes both image and instrument, allowing the work’s political questions to be carried by material, gesture and light.
What this means for artists
Nguyen’s project demonstrates how sustained research can migrate across forms. An investigation that first produced paintings and an exhibition has become a libretto, a performance and an evolving collaborative production. The change of medium creates new audiences without requiring the artist to abandon the ideas at the center of her practice.
It also makes the hidden scale of interdisciplinary work visible. Opera demands composers, performers, choreographers, technicians, producers and funders. For artists considering a similar expansion, the practical lesson is to treat collaboration and financing as part of the work’s structure from the beginning.
At Venice, the aria’s questions will sit inside an exhibition already shaped by national pavilions. A work about the instability of nationhood could hardly find a more charged stage.
