At once factual and otherworldly, Nguyen’s collaborative interdisciplinary practice addresses suppressed histories and the healing of intergenerational trauma
Developing projects through collaborative community engagement and extensive archival research, Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen (born 1976) utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight unofficial and suppressed histories. Interweaving fact and fiction and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen reworks dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war and displacement. Nguyen’s 2023 New Museum presentation is his first US solo museum exhibition, showcasing a new film and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), alongside works from the artist’s sculptural and object-based practice. Drawing together conceptual threads from across the Global South, Nguyen’s exhibition sparks a dialogue on inherited memory and testimony as forms of resistance and empowerment.
Visual artist(s): Tuan Andrew Nguyen Foreword by: Lisa Phillips Text by: Zoe Butt, Catherine Quan Damman, Eungie Joo, Nghiêm Phái Thu Linh, Christopher Myers
