“I’ve been interested in how to confuse the space between figure and foreground,” said Tammy Nguyen in a recent interview with The Art Newspaper. This is not the first time the artist has focused on confusion. She called it a “humbling place to be” during a studio visit with Lehmann Maupin gallery, and tied her comfort with confusion to “being a diasporic product.” Born in San Francisco, Nguyen is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who fled their country after the U.S. withdrawal, in 1975. In Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition in America, she blurs the line between humans and nature, portraits and landscapes, East and West. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836), Nguyen presents paintings, works on paper, and artist books that reflect on colonialism and identity, on Western transcendentalist ideas and control of the natural world. —Jeanne Malle