BIOGRAPHY

Trained at the French prestigious Ecole des Gobelins in photography, as well as at the Rodchenko School, of Franco-Vietnamese origin, Flora (Mae) NGUYEN decolonizes representations, particularly that of women from former French colonies, but also those of the landscape. She questions stereotypes, memory, the erasure of women, the collapse of the landscape, the transgenerational transmission at the heart of the intimate, through the restitution of archives in particular.

The contemporary photography international magazine Fisheye and he French national magazine Le Nouvel Obs devoted several articles to her, and her portfolio was presented in the favorites of the European House of Photography (MEP) in 2024 in Paris. Flora Nguyen will participate in prestigious international events in 2025: in September, she exhibited in Brazil, for the France-Brazil cultural season at Foto Rio, then in French Guyana for the Rencontres photographiques de Guyane, as well as in Vietnam (VCCA) as part of the Hanoi Photo Biennale.

Artwork Info:

This series of golden photographs draws inspiration from colonial-era imagery that shaped lasting representations and fantasies surrounding the female body.

Flora stages herself within deliberately constructed settings, recalling late 19th- and early 20th-century photographic studios. The artificiality is fully visible: so-called “exotic” objects mixing cultures, unexpected props, plastic elements. These details reveal how such images were fabricated, staged, and never neutral.

The figures depicted are not portraits but roles. They question how history and visual narratives have transformed individuals into symbols — and, at times, into objects.