it hasn’t even been 20 minutes “Unburied Sounds of Difficult Horizons” film by artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, the camera settles on a distinctive-looking monument on the other side of a wooden footbridge. We are located in Quang Tri Province, Central Vietnam. The bridge spans the Ben Hai River, which served as the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam for 21 years, from the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. A few miles in either direction lay the so-called demilitarized zone, a “buffer zone” that has become one of the most bombed areas on earth.
This rebuilt footbridge was a weak link linking the warring halves of a divided country. A post-war memorial at its southern end is called “Wish for National Unity”, but the tragic reality of this place is that it is littered with unexploded ordnance, leaving several well-worn trails to cross it. Anyone who ventures out risks being blown away. Memories fade, but the trauma remains not only in people’s minds, but in the land they live in.
“Unburied Sounds” is the centerpiece of “Thuan Andrew Nguyen: Brilliant Memories”, less than a month after he won the 2023 Joan Miró Award in Barcelona, on June 29. It will open at the New Museum in Manhattan. This will be his first solo exhibition at a major museum in the United States. The last time he was at a prestigious American art institution was six years ago, when he was with the Ho Chi Minh City-based collective Propeller Group, which drew the attention of the art world despite the fact that the group was on the verge of disbanding. was collecting
The Propeller Group was known for its sly and slick commentary on projects such as: “Communist TV Commercial” A mock rebranding campaign that presented neo-communism as a slightly tacky lifestyle option characterized by loose clothing, brooding folk music, and friendly smiles. Nguyen’s current work is more personal, more sensitive, and more ambitious. His videos, along with the artefacts he created for them, fill his third-floor gallery at the New Museum, addressing issues of memory and identity for those caught between two cultures: For example, “Andrew” can be summoned with the name “Tuan”.
“Since Propeller Group, much of my work has been about memory,” the 47-year-old artist said in a video interview from his studio in Ho Chi Minh City. “And how memory helps us cope with trauma. Intergenerational trauma.”
Nguyen was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, the son of a former South Vietnamese conscript. He was two years old when his parents fled Vietnam as “boat people.” He grew up in Oklahoma, Texas and then Southern California, where he encountered art as a pre-med student at the University of California, Irvine.he studied there Daniel Joseph Martinez An artist whose famously controversial contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennale made him both famous and infamous depending on how you look at it. His collection of little metal museum tags with a word or two on each with the message ‘I can’t imagine’ I want to be white all the time. Nguyen also absorbed his culture of American street culture such as hip hop, break his dance, and graffiti. He then returned to the city where his parents had fled after earning a master’s degree at the California Institute of the Arts.
Stories, endless tales, that was all he knew about Vietnam when he was a little boy. He returned not only to contact his maternal grandmother, the poet and editor he left behind, but also because he felt the need to experience the place firsthand.
“It was absolutely inevitable that I would try to root myself in it,” he told Vivian Crockett, curator of the New Museum exhibition, in an upcoming exhibition catalog. . Crockett, herself a Brazilian-born, New York-based daughter of an American father and a Brazilian mother, describes her situation as “living in one place and another and really neither. ’ he told me. It leaves you with many questions and a deep need for healing.
“For me, it’s important to find my way in relationships,” Nguyen told me. At the University of California, Irvine, Martinez was one of several art students who called themselves Renegades. At CalArts, we collaborated with a Danish art collective. super flex. With Propeller Group, he clung to the collective idea even after it became clear that two other members, Phunam Tuk Ha and Matt Lucero, wanted to move forward. At this point in his career, when I called him, Martinez suggested they might be doing him a favor. “I’ve worked with collectives, and when you work with other people, everything is at risk,” Martinez said. If Nguyen wants to dig up his own history, “he has to do it himself.”
One of Nguyen’s first major solo works was presented at the 2017 Whitney Biennale. “island,” The video was an apocalyptic set in a corner of Malaysia where his family landed when he was two years old. He told me he had wanted to make a film about Quan Tri for years, but the opportunity didn’t come until the pandemic hit. Although much of the country went into lockdown in 2021, domestic travel was still possible for part of the year. So he flew north to join Project Renew, an NGO-sponsored UXO clearance effort.
The first thing he notices is “every few hours you can hear the sound of a bomb exploding in the distance” — controlled explosions managed by Project Renew and others. Second, there are repurposed bombs everywhere, such as flowerpots, planters, and coffee shop decorations. Bombs are the only resource left in this area.
“Unburied Sounds” tells the story of Nguyet, a fictional young woman who lives in Quang Tri. She, like many women in real life, makes her living by recovering metal from unexploded ordnance. Guet’s mother is traumatized by the death of her husband, a victim of a cleaner. Her friend Lai play with cluster bombs When he was 10 years old, he was left with one eye and a stump where his two legs and arms should have been. Two cousins died in the explosion. Death and mutilation are always side by side in this place.
Woven into “Unburied Sounds” are a pair of historical figures: sculptor Alexander Calder and a Buddhist monk. Thich Nhat Hanh, both famous anti-war activists of the 60s and 70s. For Nguyen, Calder’s vocal role was news. “So in 1966 Calder took a whole page from the New York Times,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”
The young women in his films continue to meticulously balance big things. Calder style mobile Came out of a bomb case. She stumbles upon a magazine article about Calder, and she is convinced that she is Calder’s reincarnation. she wants counseling she visits a buddhist temple They learn that the temple bell was made from the shell of an American bomb that could have killed everyone there. A young monk “seeing the immeasurable benevolence of a bomb that chose not to detonate” made it into a bell.
“Unburied Sounds” comes with two short videos dealing with the legacy of French colonialism. “Ancestral Ghosts” Track down the family of a Senegalese soldier who was forced to fight for the French in Vietnam. “Because No One Living Will Listen” is inspired by a Moroccan soldier who deserted from the French army and was resettled near Hanoi.
Nguyen was intrigued by such stories because his grandfather’s brother was forced to fight against his own citizens, Ho Chi Minh’s forces, until the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu and the colonial rule ended. Recognition was the trigger. He was sent to fight a rebellion in Algeria and was eventually assigned to Martinique, a former slave colony. This explained why Nguyen has a black, French-speaking cousin in the Caribbean. But the history books say nothing about what the soldiers from the French colony experienced in Vietnam. Many of them had Vietnamese mothers and grandmothers and heard their stories until Tuan went to Senegal to find their offspring.
There’s one more video that wasn’t included in the New Museum show, but gives some background. Easily available online. “It’s as familiar as the sound of a cannon, a sad refrain.For 10 minutes, Nguyen watched 1960s Pentagon footage showing an American warship firing into the jungle and a bomb disposal worker slowly and gently pushing a 2,000-pound shell into a burial pit to detonate it safely. I arranged the recent images of. In Vietnam, where the tradition of animism is strong, not only humans but everything has a soul. And the weapon speaks quietly but powerfully.
The naval officer responsible for my stowage did not activate the contact fuze in front of my nose. For years I cursed his name. I cursed him for his helplessness, his incompetence. For leaving my shadow on me. Let me sleep here for nearly 50 years. You will slowly become part of this land. Exactly what I intended to destroy.
And that voice gives way to the haunting refrain of “Cannon Lullaby at Night,” a ’60s song about central Vietnam by South Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son. It is the woeful lamentation of those who fell victim to the most powerful, well-engineered and ultimately ineffective extermination agents who landed in their fields and villages.
There is a healing moment at the end of this video where the bomb finally explodes. A similar moment occurs near the end of “Unburied Sounds” when the heroine attempts to soothe her mother’s pain by striking a bell made from a bomb. Nguyen’s sculpture on display in the exhibition and the bell, a Calder-like mobile he made from picked up bomb parts, were tuned to 432 Hz, sometimes considered a healing frequency.
Nguyen said he wanted to be a doctor in college because it was an immigrant’s dream, but he also – and I apologize for the joking here – helping people heal. It was a dream Art gave him another way to do it. “My origins are in Vietnam. “It’s about looking at the moment,” he said.
