Artist: Minh Ngọc Nguyễn
Title: Final Squeeze
Medium: Photography
Date: 2025
Edition: 3/3 + 2 AP
Todolí Citrus Fundació Collection
The extraordinary diversity of forms, colours and meanings associated with citrus fruits has made them cultural symbols present in numerous traditions around the world. In Final Squeeze, Minh Ngọc Nguyễn takes a red grapefruit as a starting point to explore the relationships between image, identity and representation.
The photograph depicts the fruit subjected to intense pressure by a rubber band that compresses its surface to the limits of its resistance. Captured with the formal precision characteristic of studio photography, the image presents the viewer with a moment of tension and transformation, where the material begins to yield and the interior of the citrus fruit becomes visible.
Photography occupies a central place in Nguyễn’s artistic practice. Drawing on the visual codes of advertising, commercial photography and consumer culture, he investigates how images shape our perception of the world. Through carefully constructed compositions, the artist transforms everyday objects into vehicles for reflecting on memory, desire and the construction of cultural identities.
In Final Squeeze, the citrus fruit appears simultaneously as a physical object, a cultural symbol and a biographical element. The image connects the fragility and resilience of matter with the processes of transformation that affect both nature and the ways in which we construct and transmit meaning.
Minh Ngọc Nguyễn (Copenhagen, 1992)
Minh Ngọc Nguyễn is a Danish-Vietnamese artist who works with photography both as an artistic medium and as a visual system of representation. His practice explores how visual culture shapes identity, desire and cultural perception through still lifes, installations and projects that incorporate references to commercial photography, popular culture and decolonial image theory.
Through the use of everyday objects and carefully orchestrated compositions, his work questions the mechanisms through which cultural stereotypes are produced and circulated, expanding photography beyond the printed image into spatial and installation-based contexts.
