[ARTIST WORK]
“Wish You Were Here”
by JEREMY NGUYEN
This series is a meditation on solo traveling. I asked myself some questions on my recent trips to Japan, Sweden, and Finland. How does one capture visiting a location without taking selfies or setting a timer on your camera? What if you don’t want to be in the shot but want to share where you have been? How can a cartoonist draw their travels without having to draw an entire location. I wanted to share pictures of where I’ve been while also drawing and writing about them. The result of a combination of the desire to make art about travel and communicate through social media.
The selected pieces are self-portraits as I reflect on art pieces seen in my travels. I give preference to installations, sculpture, and three-dimensional spaces. Artists from these disciplines want to create interaction, and I am drawing that interaction.
How can one play in a museum and let your imagination go wild without touching the artwork? How do you tell a story of where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, and what you’ve thought? It's as if it is happening right then and there in that moment.
Jeremy Nguyen is a cartoonist, illustrator, and humor writer based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 2017, as well as in Wired, The Nib, and Airmail Weekly. He has created custom cartoons for campaigns with HBO, Netflix, Bottega Veneta x The Strand, and illustrated for publishers including Penguin Random House and Princeton Architectural Press. Nguyen also designs for the board game industry and is the author of Can I Pet Your Dog?.