Making art from bombs and memories in Vietnam
Not even 20 minutes “The unburied sounds of a troubled horizon”, a film by the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, the camera comes to rest on a striking monument at the end of a wooden walkway. We are in Quang Tri province, central Vietnam. The bridge spans the Ben Hai River, which for 21 years, from the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, was the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam. A few miles in either direction was the so-called Demilitarized Zone, a “buffer” that became one of the most bombed places on Earth.
This reconstructed pedestrian bridge was the tenuous link that connected the warring halves of the divided country. The post-war memorial on the south side is called Desire for National Reunification, but the tragic reality of this place is that it’s so littered with unexploded shells that anyone who ventures beyond a few rutted paths risks being blown apart. Memories fade, but the trauma survives, not only in people’s minds, but also in the land they inhabit.
“Unburied Sounds” is the centerpiece of “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance,” which opens June 29 at the New Museum in Manhattan — less than a month after he received the 2023 Joan Miro Prize in Barcelona. It will be his first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. The last time he was in a leading American art institution, six years ago, was with the Propeller Group, the Ho Chi Minh City-based collective that caught the attention of the art world even as the trio was on the verge of falling apart .
The Propeller Group was known for the crafty and crafty commentary of projects like “Communism Television Commercial”, a fake rebranding campaign that presented the New Communism as a slightly silly lifestyle characterized by loose-fitting clothing, upbeat folk music, and smile after friendly smile. Nguyen’s current work is more personal, subtle and ambitious. His videos, which along with artifacts he’s created for them, will fill the galleries on the third floor of the New Museum, exploring questions of memory and identity with an urgency that only someone between two cultures manages to capture – someone whose first names ” Tuan” and “Andrew” for example – could do.
“Since the Propeller Group, a lot 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 functions to help us deal with trauma. Intergenerational Trauma.”
Nguyen was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, the son of a former South Vietnamese conscript. He was 2 years old when his parents fled Vietnam as ‘boat people’. He grew up in Oklahoma, Texas and then Southern California where he discovered art as a pre-med student at the University of California, Irvine. He studied under it Daniel Joseph Martinez, the artist who was celebrated or infamous, depending on your point of view, for his contribution to the famously controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial: a collection of small metal museum tags that each carried a word or two of the message “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting White are. Nguyen also absorbed American street culture: hip-hop, breakdance, graffiti. Then, after earning an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, he returned to the city his parents had fled.
Stories, endless stories – that was all he knew about Vietnam growing up. He moved back to connect with his maternal grandmother, a poet and editor who had stayed behind, but also because he felt the need to experience the place firsthand.
“It was sheer necessity to ground myself there,” he tells Vivian Crockett, the curator of the New Museum show, in the forthcoming exhibition catalog. Crockett — herself the Brazilian-born, New York-based daughter of an American father and Brazilian mother — described his situation to me as “being from one place and another, and not really from either.” It leaves you with many questions and a deep need for healing.
“It’s important for me to find my way through the world in relation to others,” Nguyen told me. At UC Irvine, he was one of several art students mentored by Martinez who called themselves the Renegades. At CalArts he collaborated with the Danish art collective Superflex. With the Propeller Group, he stuck to the idea of a collective, even after it became clear that the other two members, Phunam Thuc Ha and Matt Lucero, wanted to move on. At this point in his career, Martinez suggested that when I called him, maybe they were doing him a favor. “I have worked with collectives. When you work with other people, everything is in jeopardy,” 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 appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial: “The island,” an apocalyptic video set in the speck of Malaysia his family landed on when he was two. He had wanted to make a film about Quang Tri for years, he told me, but it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that the opportunity presented itself. Much of the country went into lockdown in 2021, but you could still travel domestically during parts of that year. So he flew north and made contact with Project Renew, an NGO-backed effort to disarm the unexploded shells.
The first thing he noticed “is that every few hours you will hear bombs explode in the distance” – controlled explosions managed by Project Renew, among others. The second is that there are bombs everywhere – repurposed as flower pots, as planters, as coffee shop decor. Bombs are the only resource this region has left.
“Unburied Sounds” is the story of Nguyet, a fictional young woman in Quang Tri who, like many in real life, makes a living cleaning up the metal from unexploded ordnance. Nguyet’s mother is traumatized by the death of her husband, a victim of scavengers. Her friend Lai, playing with cluster bombs by the age of 10 he was left with one eye and stumps where two legs and an arm should be. Two cousins were killed in the explosion. Death and mutilation are constant companions in this place.
Woven into “Unburied Sounds” are a pair of historical figures, the sculptor Alexander Calder and the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, both famous anti-war activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Calder’s vocal role was news to Nguyen: “I mean, Calder had taken a whole page out of The New York Times in 1966,” he said. “Which is unbelievable.”
The young woman in his film creates large, meticulously balanced, Calder-style cell phones from bomb shells. She comes across a magazine article about Calder and becomes convinced that she is Calder reincarnated. Looking for advice, she visits a Buddhist temple and learns that the temple bell is made from the casing of an American bomb that could have killed everyone there. A young monk “saw the immense compassion the bomb showed for choosing not to explode”, she is told, and turned it into a bubble.
“Unburied Sounds” is accompanied by two shorter videos about the legacy of French colonialism. “Becoming the Ghost of Ancestors” traces the families of Senegalese soldiers who had to fight for the French in Vietnam. “Because No One Living Will Listen” was inspired by Moroccan troops deserting the French army and resettling near Hanoi.
Nguyen’s interest in such stories was fueled by his realization that his grandfather’s younger brother had been forced to fight against his own people—Ho Chi Minh’s forces—until the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu ended colonial rule. He was sent to Algeria to fight the rebellion there and was eventually posted to the former slave colony of Martinique. This explained why Nguyen has cousins in the Caribbean who are black and speak French. But the history books say nothing about what soldiers from French colonies in Vietnam experienced. It wasn’t until Tuan went to Senegal to find their descendants, many of whom have Vietnamese mothers or grandmothers, that he heard their stories.
There’s another video that isn’t in the New Museum show, but gives context. Easily available online, it’s called “The sounds of guns, familiar as sad choruses.For 10 agonizing minutes, Nguyen juxtaposes 1960s Defense Department footage of US warships firing into the jungle alongside recent video of a bomb-disposal crew slowly, gently pushing a 2,000-pound grenade toward a burial pit to safety. to explode. In Vietnam, with its strong animistic tradition, not only people have souls, but everything. And so the ammunition speaks softly but strongly:
The naval officer responsible for loading me failed to activate the contact fuse on the tip of my nose. For years I cursed his name. I cursed his inadequacy, his incompetence. For leaving a shadow of myself. For leaving me here for almost 50 years. Slowly becoming a part of this country. Just what I needed to destroy.
And then his voice gives way to the haunting choruses of “A Lullaby of Cannons for the Night,” a 1960s song about Central Vietnam by Trinh Cong Son, the South Vietnamese songwriter. It’s the painfully sad lament of those on the receiving end of these immensely powerful, expertly choreographed, and ultimately ineffective agents of destruction that landed in their fields and villages.
There is a healing moment at the end of this video when the bomb is finally allowed to explode. A similar moment occurs at the end of “Unburied Sounds”, when the heroine tries to ease her mother’s pain by hitting a bell she made from a bomb. The bell — a sculpture by Nguyen in the exhibit, along with Calder-style cellphones he built from discarded bomb parts — was tuned to 432 Hz, sometimes considered a healing frequency.
In college, Nguyen said, he wanted to be a doctor because that’s the dream of immigrants, but also — and here he apologized for sounding hokey — to help people heal. Art gave him another way to do that. “My starting point is Vietnam. But my ambition is to take it beyond just the stories of Vietnam,” he said — to explore, as the films in this show do, “these global moments that got us where we are today.”