By: Alicia Chen
Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born into a Vietnamese family in 1976. His parents escaped Vietnam when he was two years old and he lived with them in Oklahoma, Texas until he moved to Southern California to attend the University of California, Irvine as a pre-med student. This was also where he discovered his passion for art.
Nguyen was mentored by Daniel Joseph Martinez, a highly controversial artist known for his contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an artwork containing an array of small metal tags with a few engraved words conveying messages surrounding the theme “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting To Be White.”
When Nguyen graduated, he returned to the hometown in Vietnam that his parents had abandoned, knowing nothing about it except for assumptions made from stories he was told. Part of the reason he moved back was to bond with his grandmother, a poet and editor. But the main reason was to experience the cultures of both the U.S. and Vietnam.
He describes his mind as “being of one place and another, and not really of either.”
When he arrived in Quang Tri Province, he noticed that bombshells were littered across the region, often repurposed as decorations. It separated North and South Vietnam. Surrounded by the Demilitarized Zone, it is now known as one of the most bombed areas on Earth.
His work, a movie titled “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon,” features the fictional story of a girl named Nguyet. She lives ina region of Quang Tri and scavenges for bombshells, the only resource the area has, to repurpose for a living. Her mother, a woman of few words, was traumatized by her father’s tragic death, and her two cousins died in an explosion when her friend, Lai, was playing with cluster bombs. This movie explores themes surrounding the idea that everything has the potential for transformation and holds memories. It mentions that “You transform infinitely, carrying memory from one life to the next.”
In the movie, Nguyet learns about the healing power of vibrations. She first discovers this when a monk explains to her how he was able to tune a large bell made of a bombshell so that it acquired healing properties. Later in the movie, she helps her mother overcome her trauma by using waves emitted from bombshell bells, calming her mind and body. Those bombshells were once part of an object that was meant to destroy, but Nguyet proved that with patience, all objects can be transformed.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen said that, “I find it absolutely crucial at this moment to make these connections between spaces, people, times, stories, as well as to reevaluate the relationship between object and maker, victim and agent. Reconsidering and imagining these connections are stepping stones towards empathy, healing, and creating new futures.”
“The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon” is the centerpiece of his newest gallery, which features it and other pieces forged from the remnants of bombshells. The gallery revolves around the idea of how communities can work together to cope with loss and trauma.