In the art of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Vietnam's nightmares live on
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Tuesday, November 5, 2024


In the art of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Vietnam's nightmares live on
“Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

by Roberta Smith



NEW YORK, NY.- One of the wisest, most beautiful and unsettling exhibitions in New York this summer is “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance” at the New Museum, a show about coming to terms with the intergenerational trauma of war. Nguyen works in video and also makes art objects pertaining to them. In the three recent moving-image installations here, he creates narratives that operate in cinematic and real space in different, often affecting ways.

Nguyen was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1976 and came to the United States with his family three years later. His family lived in Oklahoma, Texas and Southern California, where he earned a B.A. and an M.F.A. Revisiting Vietnam as a young man, he came to see the country and its trials as the primary subject of his art; in 2005, he moved to Ho Chi Minh City, where he continues to live and work.

Nguyen is a documentarian and an assembler of broken things with a preference for collaboration. His work aims to heal the fragmented lives and retrieve the suppressed memories of the marginalized people most affected by colonization, war and displacement, especially in Vietnam.

The artist’s first major exhibition in an American museum, “Radiant Remembrance,” has been organized by Vivian Crockett, a curator at the museum, and Ian Wallace, a curatorial assistant. Its video installations focus on people who live in the shadow of the two long wars for Vietnamese independence.

“The Specter of Ancestors Becoming” (2019) and “Because No One Living Will Listen” (2023) explore the aftermath of the First Indochina War (1946-1954). “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon” (2022), the most ambitious work — and possibly a masterpiece — takes up the Vietnam War (1955-1975), which was known in Vietnam as the American War.

Nguyen’s taste for collective artmaking began when, as an undergraduate, he was active in a graffiti crew. It resurfaced in 2006 when he became co-founder of the Propeller Group, a three-artist collective that was especially active in the 2010s.

His own moving-image works are also collaborative: Their stories are based less on official archives than on personal interviews with people who can end up enacting versions of themselves in front of his camera.

He also strives for collaboration among art mediums — most impressively in his sculptures but also in photographs and drawings that accompany the video pieces here.

His working method is clearest in “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon,” a 58-minute video that is exhibited with a group of sculptures that also appear on screen. The ensemble was shown at the James Cohan Gallery last year. It exemplifies Nguyen’s ability to make material, space and perception, both in and around his films — what I would call form — a powerful part of their narratives.




“Unburied Sounds” is set in Quang Tri, a Vietnamese province where abundant munitions fragments and unexploded ordinance (UXOs) from U.S. bombings are a constant danger and a material resource. They are also the throughline of the video’s plot and the connection to the accompanying sculptures.

The sculptures, all from 2022, give new purposes and meanings to the discarded war metals. “Unexploded Resonance” is the shell of a large bomb, dropped from a B-52 aircraft; it hangs from an antique wood stanchion and serves as a temple gong. “Shattered Arms” is a carved wood statue of the goddess Quan Yin, whose damaged arms and hands have been repaired with shiny brass new ones cast from artillery shells. Brass also figures in “A Rising Moon Through the Smoke,” which copies and translates a signature mobile by American sculptor Alexander Calder into an artifact worthy of Eastern cultures.

These objects all appear in the film, essential to its tragic, indomitable tale. The film’s main character is Nguyet (actress Nguyen Kim Oanh), a young artist who collects scrap metal to make her living and her sculpture. Having been born in 1976, shortly after Calder’s death, she believes she is his reincarnation. Another important character is Lai (Ho Van Lai, playing himself) who was horribly maimed as a child when he accidentally detonated a cluster bomb. In the final scene of the film, he sits in saintly serenity on the rocks of a shallow stream, wearing the prosthetic brass hands that Nguyen made to repair the Quan Yin sculpture.

Neither of the remaining pieces have this knitting-together of objects and video. However, a four-channel video, “The Specter of Ancestors Becoming” (28:30), achieves its own impact — a kind of slow-moving kaleidoscope — by projecting short scenes of intergenerational and cross-cultural exchanges among the descendants of the Senegalese troops who were enlisted to fight for the French in the First Indochina War and took Vietnamese wives.

In one segment, a Senegalese Vietnamese adolescent combs the long, straight hair of her Vietnamese grandmother while gently quizzing the older woman about her past life in a country that which she will never see again. In another, a Senegalese father argues heatedly with his Senegalese Vietnamese son, who has named his baby daughter after his Vietnamese mother — still in Vietnam, whose existence his father has done everything to erase.

“Because No One Living Will Listen” (11:30 minutes) is a two-channel video that is Nguyen’s most recent work and his first to use CGI (computer-generated imagery), which increases the visionary quality of his efforts. It centers on Habiba, a Vietnamese woman who moves mournfully through the landscape holding a letter like a talisman that she has written to her dead Moroccan father, who died when she was a baby. To either side of the screen hang embroideries on white khaki fabric — enlarged versions of propaganda pamphlets that the Viet Minh insurgents dropped on French colonial troops urging them to defect, which Habiba’s father did. Balancing this change of scale, she carries and ultimately burns a small model of the Morocco Gate, built in Hanoi in the late 1950s by Moroccan defectors from the French army. The elegant anguish of the work’s title sums up her predicament.

The undercurrent of enduring suffering in the wake of war lies at the heart of “Radiant Remembrance” and runs through Nguyen’s work. Suffering is in the details, he seems to say. Nonetheless, his skill at excavating them and at embedding them in moving images and art objects makes this an inspiring, even exhilarating show.

———

‘Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance’

Through Sept. 17, the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan, New York, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

August 12, 2023

Brice Marden, who rejuvenated painting in the 1960s, dies at 84

Virginia Museum will return 'Wounded Indian' statue to Boston

MCA Australia presents 'Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River'

In the art of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Vietnam's nightmares live on

Rising star, Khalif Tahir Thompson painting promised gift to Nelson-Atkins

Couse, Grelle, and a large Borein collection highlight Moran's Art of the American West sale

Solo exhibition 'Timelapse' by Sarah Sze weaves trail of discovery through the Guggenheim

PEM presents New England debut of 'Gio Swaby: Fresh Up' starting today

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents 'Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible'

Important California estates highlight Abell Auction Co.'s upcoming Design Sale

'Twilight, Photographs by Arthur Drooker' now available

Sir Isaac Julien's exhibition 'What Freedom is to Me' to end August 20th at the Tate

The new Shepard Fairey mural 'Raise the Level' is a message of hope

Georges Salameh's "The Way We Were: A Photo Album from Carlovassia and Beyond" is now open

Samsung Art Store brings Salvador Dalí masterpieces into homes worldwide

West Horsley Place, Surrey, is now displaying The Ingram Collection

Rare Edward VIII coin that was never issued expected to fetch up to £200,000 at Noonans

The new award Le vie dell'immagine goes to Shirin Neshat

Australian artist Haein Kim opens first solo show at Edinburgh Art Festival

Discovering the Secrets of the Gilder Center

Review: A bloodless postscript to 'Jaws' in 'The Shark Is Broken'

Australian premiere: 'Atmospheric Memory', a major international immersive exhibition

Coach owner to buy parent of Versace and Michael Kors in luxury mega merger

Striking writers and studios agree to restart negotiations

Protect your property: Your prompt guide to understanding concrete crack repair NYC

Moonlit Marvels: Unveiling Marina's Beauty on a Dhow Cruise

CRSSD Festival: When House Drops Meet Fashion Pops

Adding Humor to Your Sister of the Bride Speech: Dos and Don'ts

Tips for Crafting a Heartfelt Sister of the Bride Speech




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful