UNSW Art & Design PhD candidate, James Nguyen, has been announced a winner of the 2017 Maddocks Art Prize.

First awarded in 2005, the Maddocks Art Prize is presented to two outstanding contemporary visual artists from the ACT, New South Wales, or Victoria. In keeping with Maddocks Law Firm’s support of Australian representation at the Venice Biennale, the winners of the Prize receive a return airfare, accommodation, and a cash stipend to attend this pivotal international art event and build their networks and industry relationships.

James Nguyen is a Sydney-based practitioner working across drawing, installation, video, and performance.  His most recent critically-acclaimed work explored the complexities of familial relationships between himself, his brother, and his parents as Vietnamese migrants adjusting to life in urban Australia.  Nguygen is known for his unsettling documentary style portrayal of industrial settings and displaced people.  He is the recipient of the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship that enabled him to partake in a Collaborative Fellowship at UnionDocs, a not-for-profit Centre for Documentary Art in Brooklyn, New York.  Nguyen has also been an artist-in-residence with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Beijing.  

Maddocks Chair and member of the judging panel, Mark Henry, said the quality of the artists who had applied to the competition was extraordinary, but that “in the end, James and Noriko (Nakamura) stood out for their brilliant yet challenging bodies of work”.