The Sleeper
’The Sleeper’ presents a photographic world built on Nguyen’s experience of growing up through successive expatriation cycles.
In this work, the author ruminates on the heightened perspective of life’s transience between alternating bouts of yearning and
anticipatory loss leading up to every fresh start. The images from this work are both documents of existential anxieties conceived
at the prospect of permanent separation and an exploration in experimental storytelling, offering an imaging of one’s confinement
in a reality without a conceivable future. This narrative is enacted through the eponymous character, simultaneously a delegated
self, a loved one, and an indeterminate object of desire.
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First edition of 20 hand-bound copies.
Each book includes:
60 photographs on 100gsm coated paper
156 printed pages over 56 spreads
28 sheets with 22 gatefolds
Longest spread measures 566mm
Book dimensions 148mm x 185mm.
With special thanks to Nico Gruzdev, Will Aldcroft, Jim Campbell, Lee Elkins and Ming Nguyen.
In my indulgence, I sometimes imagine your head
as my own, so I can show you how in this past year,
a lifetime has slipped by unknown to the eyes of your youth.
Other times, I’d wonder if any affection I can so apparently
feel was only conditional to the decisiveness of our forked
paths, and whether I was merely drawn to
the preciousness of all that was fleeting.
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In a sense, I think I’ve been rather cruel.