Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Developing projects through collaborative community engagement and extensive archival research, Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Saigon, Vietnam; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City) utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight underexamined and suppressed histories. Interweaving fact and fiction and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen re-works dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war, and displacement. Nguyen’s New Museum presentation will be his first U.S. solo museum exhibition, showcasing a new film and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and Specters 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.

This exhibition is curated by Vivian Crockett, Curator, with Ian Wallace, Curatorial Assistant, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum. The catalogue includes a conversation between the artist and Vivian Crockett and texts by Zoe Butt, Eungie Joo, Catherine Quan Damman, and Ocean Vuong.