Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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40 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 NGUYEN LIGHT AND AMY SHADOW DANCER "Reflecting about what's going on in the artisan crafted and local foods movements, I believe that understanding what we put on our bodies should be just as important as understanding what we put in our bodies." Patrick R. Benesh-Liu A my Nguyen's path in life seems to be like the surface of a lake mirroring the sky above, a reflection of her ever-evolving aesthetic expression. That expression seems rooted in the balance between light and dark, finding the thin line of harmonious juxtaposition of two opposing elements. Finding and treading that middle ground, whether through the artistic or in her daily routines, is the most salient aspect of Nguyen's character. In several sacred traditions, it is the trinity or a duality which is the emanation of the divine. Whether Hinduism's triune of the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer, or Daoism's Yin and Yang, East Asian epistemologies in particular point to the necessity of balancing various essential forces, rather than the Western Judeo-Christian ethos of a monopolar spirituality, a world of opposites in conflict. This is the thread that ties itself throughout Nguyen's work and into the way she approaches her life. Never settling into a single mode of being, always incorporating that which seems opposed into a harmonic whole, a clear lesson to be learned from Nguyen is that we can reconcile the seemingly contradictory aspects of our world, to great and transformative effect. Whether it is working her Buddhist meditation and yoga into her long days working at the studio, getting a strenuous physical workout from her shibori dyeing, or flirting with the