Drops of the Sun
2024
Quartz and natural light
2.6 m × 5 m (4 walls)
This work marks the next chapter in Tia-Thuy Nguyen’s ongoing journey with light.
Installed permanently in a private space within the Mareterra project in Monaco, Drops of the Sun is a quiet dialogue between quartz and sunlight — a lasting meditation on impermanence, reflection, and the invisible rhythms of nature.
The artist’s question is quiet but enduring: “How to soften the hardness? How to create a space for ease amidst the rush of the world?”. She seeks balance — a place for the mind to slow down, to breathe, to feel safe.
With ‘Drops of the Sun’, Tia-Thuy Nguyen builds a space apart — a sanctuary. Here, light does not simply fall. It moves, reflects, transforms. At each hour of the day, in each season of the year, sunlight dances differently across the quartz-covered walls. No two moments are ever the same.
The natural cloud-like patterns in the stone seem to float — colored not by paint, but by the minerals within. As light shifts, they shimmer, deepen, dissolve. This subtle choreography between light and quartz creates a space that is always alive, always becoming.
Quartz is known to carry healing energy — and here, that energy becomes shared. It’s not loud, but it’s luminous. It meets each person who enters with something soft, something vital.
Not to impress, but to soothe. Not to explain, but to hold.
Choosing stone — choosing stillness
To gather the right stones — with the right hues, shapes, and luminosity — Tia-Thuy Nguyen and her collaborators traveled across Vietnam, visiting sites where each stone told its own quiet story. The team worked with patience and sensitivity, carefully polishing rough quartz to reveal its inner clarity, its way of holding light, its silent capacity to speak.
This was not just a technical process, but a meditative one.
Stone selection required not only skill, but also stillness: passion without urgency, attention without attachment. It was a shared practice between artist and artisan — a mutual act of listening, not imposing.
After twelve months, from an initial six tons of raw stone, four tons were carefully chosen for the final installation. Each piece was refined and polished, then placed under sun and moonlight — not to force transformation, but to allow the stones to quietly absorb the energy of earth and sky, over many days and nights.
Drawing inspiration from the natural hues of the selected quartz, Tia-Thuy Nguyen began sketching the form of a cloud — not as an image, but as a state of being. She tested many configurations: horizontal, vertical, random; arranged by color, shape, or asymmetry. The goal was never to “construct” the cloud, but to let it drift into form — a soft, luminous body shifting gently with each breath of light and space.
