Casual Ghosts is a sculptural series that delves into the spectral residues of Hanoi’s trading heritage, offering a quiet yet powerful meditation on the layered histories that continue to shape the city's identity. Through ghostly forms and suggestive absence, Nguyen conjures the echoes of a commercial past—one marked by colonial entanglements, cultural exchange, and erasure.

The series acts as both elegy and invocation, bringing forward narratives that have long been obscured or overlooked. In doing so, Casual Ghosts invites viewers into a space of reflection, where memory and material intersect to raise questions about loss, resilience, and remembrance. The works do not reconstruct history, but rather haunt its silences—making space for the stories that linger just beneath the surface.

By bridging the temporal divide between past and present, Nguyen's sculptures prompt a dialogue around the enduring effects of colonialism on cultural heritage. These apparitions, neither fully present nor entirely gone, become markers of a city's shifting soul—inviting us to listen more closely to what history leaves behind.