Khang Bảo Nguyễn
Khang Bảo Nguyễn is a visual artist and professor of philosophy and religion. The work of Khang Bao Nguyen is a visual investigation into the nature of perception, knowledge, temporality, and nondual consciousness—otherwise known as the “ground of Being,” or Being as such. Through painting and sculpture, Nguyen explores the capacity of aesthetic contemplation to disclose this ground by surpassing dualistic perception.
Ordinary experience is structured by a division between observer and observed, subject and object. While this distinction enables us to navigate everyday life, it also obscures the undivided ground from which both arise. Nguyen's work invites viewers to loosen the hold of this habitual framework, opening a space in which that unity may be recognized.
Through translucent layers, geometric structures, and shifting spatial relationships, Nguyen constructs intricate diagrams that invite self contemplation. Each work functions as a perceptual threshold, drawing the mind away from the habitual patterns of thought and the tendency to fragment experience. In that opening, consciousness turns back upon itself, disclosing its primordial nature prior to differentiation.
What emerges is not the acquisition of new knowledge but a recognition of what is ever present: a sustaining ground of Being. This recognition is not achieved through exertion or conceptual grasp, but spontaneously, when the very structures that conceal it fall away. Nguyen's work, therefore, does not produce this recognition; it simply invites the mind to settle into its own clarity, wherein nondual consciousness may reveal itself.
Claremont Graduate University
PhD, Philosophy and Religious Thought
MFA, Studio Art
