Mantra draws inspiration from the Bàn Thổ Công Thần Tài—the Altar of the Earth God and God of Wealth—commonly found nestled within Vietnamese shopfronts. In this double-panel painting, Nguyen conjures a portal into an otherworldly realm, where spiritual symbology, ritual practice, and contemporary life collide.

At the heart of Mantra lies an interplay between indigenous animist beliefs, traditional craft, and industrial materiality. This fusion allows Nguyen to challenge linear perceptions of time, opening space for layered readings of the present as both continuous and ever-shifting. The work moves fluidly between the sacred and the commercial, the ancestral and the immediate, tracing how cultural practices persist, adapt, and echo through modernity.

The panels become more than surface—they are thresholds. Within their folds lies a question, whispered rather than declared:
When the boundaries of two beings touch, in the space of a meeting, of an exchange, of a change, something is born there then—what is it?