Dan Nguyen is having trouble with the Viper Pit. Its iridescent curves threaten to slip from his hands, even with his assistant, Christian Ramirez, shouldering half its weight as they attempt to mount it on a few freestanding photo boards. The metallic teal of a blue morpho butterfly, the undulating, carved ash wood sculpture is the brightest thing in this vast warehouse permeated with the whir of machinery and the earthy scent of sawdust. At 100 pounds, with a 54-inch diameter, it demands your gaze.
“Bigger works have a different type of presence,” says Nguyen, who goes by Nuge, an affectionate nickname lifted from a mispronunciation of his last name. “It can change the energy in a room.”
Nuge would know. The Boston-born artist began his career as an architect, studying the craft at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. “It was a fulfilling experience for me because I love design. I love to draw and work with my hands—I got to build physical models for my designs,” he says. After he obtained his master’s, “I moved out to San Francisco, and then, right away, I realized that the world of architecture versus what life in school was like was completely different. For the entire process of designing a home and all the work that goes into it, the designing is maybe two percent of the process.”
In 2020, Nuge moved his operation into shared Miramar makers’ space Maketory.
After 18 months in SF, Nuge moved to an architecture firm in San Diego but found the work increasingly draining and creatively stifling. Desperate for an outlet, he took a weekend-long wood cutting board–making class, with ambitions of eventually crafting furniture. “That alone was one of the most gratifying feelings because, up until that point, I never got to own any part of the process,” he recalls. “But this simple cutting board—from the concept to the final product, all of it was mine. I was hooked.”
He began woodworking daily after his 9-to-5. Then, in 2016, he got laid off from the firm. He took it as an opportunity to pursue art more seriously. “I told myself—and also my mom—that if this didn’t work out in six months, I’d apply for more jobs in architecture and get back to the grind,” Nuge says.
Nuge’s work celebrates wood’s unique grain and unexpected softness.
One of his first clients was sales director Jeffrey Bitner, who gave him full creative license. As Nuge worked on the piece, the two became friends and eventually roommates in Del Mar. Nuge credits Bitner as a vital sounding board for his creative process—and the piece, with its rippling texture (inspired, Nuge explains, by rumpled bed sheets) and shiny, single-color paint that shows off the wood’s grain—would become emblematic of Nuge’s style.
“It’s almost like he’s had all of these ideas and thoughts running through his head his whole life, and, finally, everything was exploding out of him and he was able to start creating and getting all this stuff out and letting it flow,” Bitner recalls of the early days of Nuge’s practice. “You could just see the light inside of him.”
Others saw it, too. Steady sales at $10,000 to $25,000 per piece allowed Nuge to keep making art full-time. He placed his work at a number of galleries. Tiffany & Co. commissioned 10 pieces, displaying them at stores as near as Palo Alto and far-flung as Tokyo. In 2023, he landed his first museum show, a three-month exhibition at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History in LA County.
While he’s currently in the process of moving into his own dedicated space, since 2020, he’s crafted every piece in Miramar at the shared makers’ space Maketory—where Viper Pit finally slides into place, ready to be photographed.
Intricate, repeated textures are a hallmark of the artist’s work.
Stepping back, Nuge’s assistant Ramirez floats a fingertip over the contours of the piece’s deep wood grain. “Sandblasting gave it that definition,” he explains.
Ramirez has been working with Nuge for three years. He helps Nuge carve, sand, sandblast, and paint his massive-scale pieces, which can take up to five months to complete. Albert Dawson, another employee who recently resigned to pursue an MFA, spent three years supporting Nuge’s efforts, too. But, while there is a long legacy of artists who have managed to ramp up production by delegating most of the labor to assistants—Rembrandt, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons—that list won’t ever include Nuge.
For Viper Pit, Nuge “wanted to go scaly kind of vibes,” says his assistant, Christian Ramirez. “Snaky, but not super literal. It’s like serpents slithering underneath each other.”
“I love working,” he says. “If I’m not in the studio, I’m more like an art director, rather than an artist with my hands in it. I want to steer the creative ship.”
That’s also why, in addition to completing commissions for private collectors and the occasional corporate or business client, Nuge consistently dedicates time toward personal projects. “This past year, I made it a point to play with new materials,” he says.
Made of foam, felt, and epoxy clay, Wiggle Room (2024) represents Nuge’s recent foray into new materials.
In the aptly named Wiggle Room, for example, waves of epoxy clay squirm across a heathered terrain of blue-green felt. Nuge has expanded into ceramics, too, using wood to create textured silicon models that give his clay pieces the same grain and gravitas as his hallmark works. Piled on a table in one corner of the warehouse are ceramic structures a few feet tall, with interlocking sections reminiscent of vertebrae. Nuge plans to stack them into one massive pillar, he says, studying a minute fissure in one slab. “The cracks aren’t too bad,” he decides. He gestures toward another ceramic piece. “That has ’em, and that makes it look like an ancient ruin.”
His goal is to give commissioning clients an expanded reference point for the Nuge aesthetic. “Typically, they point to pieces I’ve made and say they want something like that,” he explains. “If I want people to ask me to make it, I have to make it first.”
However, not everyone is so prescriptive. Shane Foye, managing partner at jobsite management firm Discount Waste Inc. dba DW1, gave Nuge carte blanche on the two pieces he requested for his art-filled Georgia office, where Foye curates a sealed private collection.
“Normally, I wouldn’t do that, but you could tell that he cared about it probably more than anyone that’s ever going to get a piece from him. He wants that outcome to be perfect,” Foye explains. “For the first piece, I just sort of put it in his hand and said, ‘Is there something you’ve always wanted to create?’”
Dan putting the finishing touches on Dreamland
The result was Dreamland, a 72-inch-diameter, ash wood circle in varying shades of blue. Its 136 pieces form smaller, overlapping circles across the work, like a puddle disturbed by a soft rain.
“I consider him to be a very visionary thinker,” Foye adds. “He has [each piece] so crystal-clear in his head that the complexity to get it done is way more involved than he would ever portray. It seems so simple when he’s explaining it, but I can’t imagine the challenges he faces when producing [the work].”
Nuge doesn’t shy away from discussing the hard parts. “I don’t know why, but I thought that ceramics would be less labor-intensive and more Zen. And it has been the exact opposite of that,” he admits. “It’s so stressful. It’s even more finicky than wood.” Yet a key word comes up more than once: play.
In the studio, dressed in a respirator and a wood shaving–coated hoodie, his eyes a bit red from flying sawdust, Nuge wears the evidence of his efforts all over him. But there’s a joy to him, a palpable “I can’t believe I get to do this for a living” energy, that makes it look fun.
“I’ve been playing with [clay] for a year now and I’m absolutely in love with it, and because it’s a challenge, it makes me wanna learn it more,” he says. “Architecture was very restraining and hard-lined and rigid. So I feel like my path as an artist is almost a rebellion to that entire aspect.”
