LE NGHI TENG 鄧麗儀 (Vietnam, 1976) grew up in a Chinese family that resettled in the Netherlands when she was three. After a successful period in finance she walked away, trading balance sheets for the quiet lilt of light on skin. Her photographs are meditations rather than records, shaped by Taoist ideas of stillness, impermanence, and the endlessly unfolding “way”. In her words, she listens to the heart, lets images “arise spontaneously”, and seeks the moment where personal breath meets the breath of the universe.

Teng refined her craft at the University of Applied Photography in Rotterdam (2014–2016), immersing herself in slow-looking and intuitive portraiture.

Since graduating she has shown work at Unseen Amsterdam and KunstRAI, staged the two-person project Gongshi and the White Cloud at Contour Gallery, and appeared in group programs at Nederlands Fotomuseum, PhotoLondon, Voies Off (Arles), and ICA Gallery (Tokyo).

Recognition followed quickly: Silver Winner at the Tokyo International Foto Awards, Finalist for LensCulture’s Exposure Awards, and Winner of the British Journal of Photography’s Open Walls (2020). Publications such as GUP New Dutch Photography Talent, Dodho, LensCulture, and PhotoVogue have featured her images, and her work appears in New Dutch Photography Talent 2019 and The Best of LensCulture Vol. 2.

Represented by Contour Gallery in Rotterdam, Teng continues to explore the liminal space where cloud banks, childhood memories, and a single, steady exhale meet. Her portraits feel almost weightless, yet they linger: quiet provocations that ask us to stand still long enough to notice the tremor of being alive.

The Way of Water 水之道 is a collaborative project that brings together a selection of Le Nghi Teng 鄧麗儀’s work in dialogue with original poems by Jorge R. G. Sagastume, written in response to the images. The project unfolds as a sustained meditation on water, not as a poetic symbol, but as the Tao 道 in motion.

Sagastume is a writer, editor, and professor of literature and philosophy, and the editor of The Pasticheur. Literature, Art & Ideas. His work moves between poetry, storytelling, criticism, and visual dialogue, with a sustained interest in the body, the self, memory, and the ethics of looking.

More of her work may be appreciated on her website and Instagram account.