By: Annabelle Ma

Tran Nguyen is opening the New Museum, which will include artifacts and stories, in Manhattan on June 29. It will be Nguyen’s first major solo museum in the United States.

The last time that Nguyen was in a leading American art institution was six years ago as part of the Propeller Group. Their art captured the attention of audiences around the world even when the group was falling apart.

The Propeller Group was famous for projects like “Television Commercial for Communism,” a campaign espousing that new Communism is a silly lifestyle choice. Now, Nguyen’s projects are more mature and ambitious than his old ones.

“Since the Propeller Group, a lot of my work has been about memory,” Nguyen said in a video interview from his studio in Ho Chi Minh City, “and how memory functions to help us deal with trauma.”

Before joining the Propeller Group, Nguyen studied at the University of California, Irvine. His teacher, Daniel Joseph Martinez, is famous for his contribution to the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial.

Nguyen’s first major solo work was “The Island,” completed in 2017. “The Island” is a video set in the islands of Malaysia.

Another of his recent projects is a video called “Unburied Sounds” in Qiang Tri, a province in Vietnam. This video is about the dangers of the bombshells in Qiang Tri. To make this video, he flew north during the lockdown in 2021 to Qiang Tri where he met up with Project Renew, a project that tries to disarm the unexploded shells.

“Unburied Sounds” and two other shorter videos will be showcased inside of the New Museum. Now that Nguyen has had such a successful past, he is ambitious to meet his goals for the future.

“My starting point is Vietnam. But my ambition is to extend it beyond just the narratives of Vietnam,” he said.