Found in Translation

Talent agent Thao Nguyen’s whole world is art, both at home with her personal collection and at CAA where she cultivates artists in pop culture

by Eli Diner

Photography by Fabian Martinez

The first thing you notice when you arrive at CAA agent Thao Nguyen’s Brentwood  home are the polka dots. Peppering the facade of a paragon of Southern California ranch-style modernism—all sharp lines and right angles—the dots are conspicuously circular. “My daughter is a huge Kusama fan,” she says, and the dots, which originally went up as Halloween decorations inspired by the artist, were a hit with the neighbors, who (together with her daughter) lobbied to leave them in place. The story, as she tells it, seems to capture—at a very local level—something of  the way Nguyen works with artists: shifting contexts and cultivating new audiences.  

Nguyen has been with CAA for 23 years, and in that time she has found herself increasingly operating at the nexus of art and entertainment, building pathways between these worlds and creating opportunities for artists to disseminate their work beyond the confines of  galleries and museums. “My goal is to democratize  art,” she says. “I’m not interested in playing with ideas that only reach the top one percent. That’s just not interesting to me. Where I sit at the agency, we play in pop culture. That’s just part of our DNA. So, how can I work with very specific artists to translate their ideas into pop culture?” 

The first step in this translation process, it seems, is recognizing the artists who she thinks can make the leap from fine art to Hollywood. Nguyen has built a client roster at CAA that includes Martine Syms, Khalil Joseph, Alex Prager and Ref ik Anadol. “Every one of them is open to new ways of working,” she says. “They are cultural innovators. They’re not confined by certain rules.” 

The next step is convincing Hollywood to let the artists in. Nguyen says that’s the exciting part. “My job is to help create the context to realize their ideas.” 

That contextualizing is well underway. Prager, the Los Angeles artist known for her cinematic photography and iconic short films, will begin shooting her first feature in March, an AI thriller called DreamQuil. Syms, a critically lauded artist who works across disciplines, connected with Nguyen when Syms was searching for distribution for her independently produced first feature, The African Desperate (2022). She is now at work on an adaptation of an undisclosed novel. 

Nguyen’s most ambitious work of translation has been the project of developing Joseph’s video  installation BLKNWS into a feature film. Shown in numerous venues, including the 2018 Venice Biennale and the 2020 “Made in L.A.” exhibition, BLKNWS is a conceptual news program comprising a highly edited and constantly changing montage of depictions of Black  life—hardly  an obvious candidate for a Hollywood adaptation. “BLKNWS has always been fascinating to me,” she says. “There have been many iterations of it, but it has always been somewhat ephemeral. More people need to see it. It’s game-changing.” It was five years ago that she first  proposed turning the multichannel  video  collage  into  a  wide-release  movie. Joseph was game, and a year ago it was announced that Participant and A24 had signed on to produce.  “They understood the vision, and you have to hand it to them,” Nguyen says. “It’s not a normal movie, and it’s not a normal process. I have to commend them for being open to taking this creative risk.” 

Of course, a key piece of the translator’s task is ensuring the integrity of the message, something Nguyen is sensitive to. “Artists are so singular in the way that they think and the way  that they work,” she says. “So how can I preserve that as much as possible when I’m working with their ideas and translating that in a new way, on a new platform?” 

As you’d expect from someone who works so closely with art, Nguyen chooses to live surrounded by it as well. The house covered in Kusama-inspired Halloween polka dots where she lives with her husband, architect Andreas Krainer, and their two daughters, is home as well to a collection she began assembling 15 years ago. She tells me there is no theme, no guiding  principles. “For me,” she says, “art is about emotion. I buy what I like. Period.” If nothing else, the collection leans in the direction of Los Angeles: a Larry Bell glass cube, a scrawled text painting from Raymond Pettibon, a psychedelic James Welling photograph of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, as well as works by Jonas Wood, Elad Lassry, Thomas Houseago and Tristan Unrau. More than anything, there is an unfussiness and intimacy about it all, which is reflected in the personal connections and relationships that undergird some of the work. A place of  prominence is given to Nuestra Victoria (Our Victory) (2022) a pink-hued painting depicting Mexico City’s landmark Angel of Independence created by young Mexican painter Julieta Gil, whom Nguyen had become friends with when the latter was doing her MFA at UCLA. The very human scale of the house adds to the effect. Built in 1951, it was designed and occupied by Kenneth Anderson, who had studied under Mies van der Rohe. After Anderson, another architect moved in, Frederick E. Emmons, who opened a firm with A. Quincy Jones. Now the  third architect to live there, Krainer contributed one more addition in keeping with the style of  his predecessors. 

Outside sits a Nathan Mabry sculpture, Weeping Figure (Déja Vu) (2011). It’s a totemic form in patinaed metal that reworks Jacques Lipchitz’s high-modernist Figure (1926–30). When Nguyen and Krainer were married, it was the only thing listed on their registry.