Kimvi Nguyen

Bio

Kimvi Nguyen, known professionally as KIMVI, is a British-Vietnamese interdisciplinary visual and behavioural (performance) artist, practice-based researcher, and transnational educator. Throughout her career, she has maintained a parallel commitment to teaching and knowledge exchange. From 2021 to 2025, she served as Artist-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Architecture, School of Design at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, China. She has also worked as a guest reviewer at the Architectural Association’s Shanghai Summer School, held at the Power Station of Art (2024–2025). A regular contributor to the Talking Heads Artist Lecture Series at the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art (2016–2025), she is currently a Scientific Member of the Performing Space Organization in Nafplio, Greece (since 2023).

Kimvi’s biography embodies themes of cultural translation and displacement—themes that inform the emotional geographies explored throughout her practice. Her academic formation reflects a sustained commitment to the relationship between body, material, and space. She earned a BA in Fine Art Sculpture with First Class Honours from Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (2011). Her first position after graduation was at the renowned Morris Singer bronze foundry, where she worked in the wax department in Hampshire, UK. This material-driven foundation  established the sensibility that would later become central to her performative work.

In 2025, she completed an MA in Performing Public Space at Fontys University Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, Netherlands, as a recipient of the Netherlands Government Scholarship. This advanced study deepened her critical engagement with public space as both a site of artistic intervention and a field of scholarly inquiry. Her research—focusing on public resting 
behaviours in China’s public spaces—remains an ongoing inquiry.

Kimvi’s practice is fuelled by travel to diverse cultures and terrains as a form of immersive knowledge exchange. This approach was forged through formative site-responsive residencies: a one-month period on the naval base island of Kronstadt, Russia (2015); and a two-month residency in Tamnought, Morocco (2017), supported by the Creative Foundation and a STEP Travel bursary, where she collaborated with the Berber community in traditional mud brick production.

A key shift in her practice occurred when she moved to China in 2021. There, she realised that her work resonated with the Chinese art movement of xíngwéi yìshù (⾏为艺术), literally translated as "behaviour art." Unlike the English word "performance"—which suggests a destination—"behaviour" suggests a journey. Behaviour refers to how a person acts or reacts in relation to their surroundings; in this sense, it is situation-based. In 2022, she undertook her first China research project: a two-month, fully funded residency through C-Platform’s Lucitopia programme at the open-air Xi Art Museum, located in the valleys of Qingliang Mountain in Jiangxi Province. Immersed in rural southern China, she studied vernacular design by living and working alongside villagers. This experience yielded the 3 Mountains project: two site-responsive structures built using only locally sourced materials—bamboo, grass, roof tiles, and wood—with proportions derived from the artist’s own body, representing the application of human scale in architectural design. A related behaviour art film from this residency, Auntie’s Tiles – created in collaboration with local villager Auntie Luo Juhua. The film received an ArchiShorts Award from Canada’s Architecture + Design Film Festival (2023), a Special Mention – Golden Pear Award from the Cine Plus Performance Art Festival in Argentina (2022), and was screened nationwide in New Zealand as part of the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival (2023).

Among Kimvi’s significant research collaborations is a fully funded industry design research project with Senior Professor Jacob de Baan, titled The Oldest Reconstructed Ceramic Vessel: Humanistic Interpretation and Design Regeneration of the Yuchanyan Vessel. Engaging material-based design studies of pottery sherds discovered in Hunan Province—dated between 17,500 and 18,300 years old and among the oldest known examples of ceramic pottery in the world – Kimvi’s filmed performance Yuchanyan? emerged as a work of performative research. The piece speculates on the possible uses of this ancient vessel, bridging archaeology, material culture, and contemporary artistic imagination. The performance premiered at the Cumulus Conference: Design for Intercultural Innovation at XJTLU (2024) and was subsequently featured at the International Conference on Digital Heritage and Intelligent Design Engineering (DHIDE 2025) in Hangzhou, with research 
outcomes exhibited at the China International Furniture Fair (CIFF) in Guangzhou (2026). Most recently, a furniture design collaboration led by product designer Boyi Zhou (CN) – inspired by Vietnam’s public seating culture – was shown as part of a group exhibition at Medium Gallery (VN 2026).

Throughout her career, Kimvi has combined deep creative inquiry with a collaborative, open approach to both making and teaching—supporting the public, artists, academics, and students alike. She facilitates performance-based residencies in China and delivers body-based workshops. These include the performance workshop Space-Consciousness, presented at the Performing Space Conference in Nafplio, Greece (2024), in collaboration with Professor Alberto Morell Sixto (Architect, Polytechnic University of Madrid) and Dr Gina Giotaki (Dance, University of Peloponnese). A second ongoing initiative, the somatic workshop Embodied Perception of the Senses, forms part of the industry design research project Solutions for the Visually Impaired, a collaboration with XJTLU Industrial Design Professor Vicente Esteban and Mariia Zolotova, initiated in 2025. This workshop has been delivered at XJTLU, China (2025); The Design Village, New Delhi, India (2025); and the Symposium on Interculturality and Interdisciplinarity, a Cumulus Association event held at the Institute of Creativity and Innovation (ICI), China (2026).

Kimvi’s work moves fluidly between the artist’s studio, the university classroom, the rural village, urban landscapes, and the international conference stage—each context informing and enriching the others. What unites her diverse activities is a fundamental conviction: performance is a legitimate and powerful methodology for design speculation, for art-making as an iterative process, and for pedagogy.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/artistkimvi/