Tuan Andrew Nguyen
[1][2] His work taps into counter-memory, testimony and dialogue as forms of political resistance and empowerment, highlighting unofficial and underrepresented histories involving the fragmented consciousness of colonial inheritance and the cultural estrangement of expatriation and repatriation.
[3][4][5] He interweaves factual and speculative elements—archival resources, fiction, explorations of material memory embedded in objects (animism), and supernatural realms—in order to rework dominant narratives into poetic vignettes that imagine alternate forms of healing, survival and political potentiality.
[1][20] That same year Nguyen returned to Vietnam and settled in Ho Chi Minh City, in part out of a desire to understand and learn from his grandmother, who became a writer and published poet there at a young age.
[21][9] Nguyen's early exhibitions included solo shows at Voz Alta Projects (San Diego, 2004) and Galerie Quynh (Ho Chi Minh City, 2008), the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennial, and screenings at international and experimental film festivals.
[29][31] According to Artforum critic Murtaza Vali, Nguyen's sculptural work "seeks to give visibility and voice to displaced and marginalized communities, often through 'testimonial objects,' i.e., physical repositories of memory that retain the agency to narrate these recollections.
[2][31][21] The video was set in both real and surreal landscapes and revolved around a fictional Socratic dialogue (in voiceover) between the wandering spirits of the last Javan rhinoceros (poached in 2010) and the last giant softshell turtle concerning political revolution against humans.
[8] The video mixed historical footage with a dystopian narrative about the last two humans on earth: a man who is the island's last inhabitant and a woman scientist who washes up on shore after witnessing a nuclear holocaust.
[7] It juxtaposed hand-carved wooden objects with a video fable set in an unspecified post-apocalyptic future that portrayed a band of scrawny children in steampunk headdresses navigating the open seas in a whimsical yellow boat.
[41] Its imagined, real and poetic cross-cultural exchanges depicted intergenerational memories, desires and conflicts from the small Vietnamese-Senegalese population in Dakar—descendants of colonial Senegalese troops conscripted to fight for the French in the war (the tirailleurs sénégalais) who took Vietnamese wives and then returned.
[16][4][9] Because No One Living Will Listen (2023), a two-channel work using CGI, centered on a Vietnamese woman mourning her father, a Moroccan soldier and defector who died when she was a baby; its video screen was bounded on either side by white khaki fabric embroideries—enlarged versions of the propaganda pamphlets that Viet Minh insurgents dropped on French colonial troops urging them to defect.
[6][9][32][42] The video, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, centered on a woman who runs a small junkyard with her mother on the outskirts of Quang Tri one of the most heavily bombed areas in history, still haunted by a legacy of death and dismemberment, physical residue and the ongoing danger of unexploded ordnance (UXO).
