'If they survive, they are refugees' is a new series of embossed aluminium works by Duong Thuy Nguyen which reinterprets Joan Wakelin’s 1989–1990 photographs of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong detention centres, originally commissioned by Save the Children and now archived at the V&A. By reinterpreting these historical images through a process of material transformation, I seek to reactivate their presence—not as static records but as tactile conduits between past and present.
The act of embossing, of pressing memory into metal, explores how history lingers within material surfaces, how it is preserved, distorted, and ultimately, reimagined.

By pressing these histories into metal, I explore how the physicality of an artwork can evoke the spectral traces of memory, questioning the ways in which history lingers, shifts, and slips from view. Photographic reproduction and embossing become gestures of both preservation and distortion. In this act of reworking, the image is neither fully intact nor entirely lost, but exists in a state of suspension—an echo of the precariousness embedded within the historical subject itself.

This body of work does not seek to reconstruct the past as it was, but rather to expose its fractures, its absences, and its persistent echoes. By engaging with Wakelin’s documentation, I aim to illuminate the entangled relationship between remembrance and forgetting, between what is preserved and what is erased. What remains is not only a meditation on displacement and identity but a broader reflection on the instability of historical truth—an invitation to question how we see, remember, and ultimately, how we choose to bear witness.

Duong Thuy Nguyen (b. Vietnam) is an artist and writer working between Hanoi and London. Her interdisciplinary practice engages with memory, displacement and overlooked histories. Through experimental strategies, she reshapes knowledge production and fosters critical dialogue around colonial legacies, marginalisation, and industrialisation.

Nguyen holds an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, where she was awarded the Maison/0 This Earth Award and the FRESH TAKE 2023 Prize. Her work is also held in the UAL Collection. Recent exhibitions include: New Art Exchange Open 24 (Nottingham), Enigma of Arrival (RCA, London), No Place Like Home (Museum of the Home, London) and The Space Between (TMLightning Gallery, London, 2023).

She is currently a resident artist at the Museum of the Home as part of the Vietnamese Archives Artist Residency: Library of Ancestral Knowledge.