Nước nhà draws inspiration from the iconic Vietnamese sấu drink—preserved dracontomelon fruit steeped in brine and sugar, a staple in working-class households. By placing miniature representations of homes within a jar, Nguyen creates a surreal and uncanny tableau that invites critical reflection on cultural preservation, class, and memory.

This work stages a quiet provocation: what happens when the domestic is treated as something to be preserved, displayed, or consumed? By suspending urban vernacular architecture in liquid, Nước nhà blurs the boundaries between nourishment and nostalgia, containment and celebration. The familiar is rendered strange, prompting viewers to question which cultural values are embraced, which are commodified, and which are discarded.

Through this transformation, Nguyen injects the urban landscape into a symbolic vessel of everyday life. The jar becomes both reliquary and critique—holding fragments of lived experience while interrogating the ways working-class histories are often pickled into stasis, aestheticised without full acknowledgement. The work gestures toward broader questions of cultural survival, displacement, and the politics of taste—inviting a deeper contemplation of how classed spaces are remembered, preserved, or forgotten.