By: Sophie Tian
Set to open June 29th at the New Museum in Manhattan, “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon,” the centerpiece of “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance,” uncovers hidden stories about the Vietnam War. “A lot of my work has been about memory and how memory functions to help us deal with trauma,” said Nguyen.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 to a former South Vietnamese soldier. When he was two, his parents escaped Vietnam to the US. There, he grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, and California. Nguyen was originally a pre-med student at the University of California, Irvine, until he took a liking to art.
He studied art under Hispanic artist and social critic Daniel Joseph Martinez, infamous for his work in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, a collection of metal museum tags that each contained a part of the message “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White”. Then, after earning an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Nguyen moved back to his birthplace, Ho Chi Minh, to visit his grandmother.
At one point, he worked with the Propeller Group and was part of a collective, until the other two members decided to quit the project. His mentor, Martinez, thinks it was a good thing for Nguyen’s career. “I’ve worked with collectives. When you work with other people, everything is compromised. He has to do [it] by himself,” said Martinez.
The 2017 Whitney Biennial featured one of Nguyen’s first works, a short film called “The Island.” The film is set in a post-Vietnam War refugee camp in Malaysia where the artist’s family stayed when he was two.
“Unburied Sounds” will be accompanied by two shorter videos to complete “Radiant Remembrance” at the New Museum. The first, “The Spector of Ancestors Becoming,” follows soldiers forced to fight for the French in Vietnam. The other, “Because No One Living Will Listen,” follows Moroccan troops that deserted the French and settled down.
Another one of Nguyen’s works, which won’t be featured in the New Museum collection, is called “The Sounds of Cannons, Familiar Like Sad Refrains.” It shows both 1960s footage of American warships firing into a jungle and recent footage of a bomb disposal crew placing a 2,000-pound bombshell into a pit to detonate safely.
When Vietnam went under lockdown because of Covid in 2021, Nguyen flew north to Quang Tri and connected with Project Renew, which tried to disarm unexploded shells. He described “bombs exploding in the distance every few hours” and bombshells being repurposed as everything from flowerpots to décor. Bombshells became the area’s greatest resource.
“Unburied Sounds” follows a fictional young woman in Quang Tri called Nguyet. She supports herself by scavenging metal from unexploded bombs. Her mother holds trauma from the death of her husband, a scavenging victim, the injuries of her friend, left with one eye and stumps where legs and an arm should be, and the deaths of two cousins.
Nguyet stumbles across a magazine article on sculptor and antiwar campaigner Alexander Calder, and believes she is Calder reincarnated because of the art she makes out of bombshells.
She then visits a Buddhist temple, where she discovers its bell is made of an unexploded bomb that could have killed everyone in the area. A monk believed the weapon showed immense compassion by not exploding; he turned it into a bell. For the film, Nguyen made the bell himself and named it “Unexploded Resonance.”
At the end of “Unburied Sounds,” Nguyet soothes her mother’s trauma by striking a bell like the one at the Buddhist temple. It’s made from a bomb, which she tuned to 432 Hz, often considered a healing frequency.
Nguyen said he originally wanted to be a doctor because he wanted to help people heal. Then, he realized he could heal through art instead. That’s what inspired many of his works; the stories he tells heal old wounds from the Vietnam War. “My starting point is Vietnam. But my ambition is to extend it beyond,” he said.