This series of embossed works on aluminium engages with Joan Wakelin’s 1989–1990 photographs of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong detention centres—images originally commissioned by Save the Children and now held in the archive of the V&A. Through a process of material transformation, Nguyen reinterprets these documentary photographs, seeking not to preserve them as static records, but to reactivate their presence as tactile conduits between past and present.

Embossing—pressing memory into metal—becomes a metaphorical gesture, exploring how history is held within material surfaces: how it persists, distorts, and ultimately, reconfigures itself. The physicality of the metal surface evokes the spectral qualities of memory, its weight and its erosion. The image, once clear, becomes suspended—caught between presence and absence, legibility and loss. It is in this liminal state that the work resonates most: as an echo of precarious lives, of impermanence, and of the tenuousness of representation itself.

Rather than attempting to reconstruct the past, Nguyen’s work exposes its ruptures—its silences, omissions, and persistent reverberations. Engaging with Wakelin’s photographic archive, the series illuminates the tension between remembrance and forgetting, between the visible trace and the historical void. This body of work emerges as both elegy and inquiry—a meditation on displacement and identity, and a broader reflection on how we inherit, interpret, and carry the weight of collective memory.