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Tuan Andrew Nguyen CURRENT AND UPCOMING Group exhibition SOFT POWER, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA October 26, 2019 – February 17, 2020 Journey Beyond the Arrow, curated by Zoe Butt, Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates March 7 - June 10, 2019 TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN Born in 1976 in Saigon, lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam ARTWORK DETOUR: LIVED WORLDS, 2018 EXHIBITION, ART021 SHANGHAI CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR Detour examines the consequences of globalization and the return to regionalism in the Pacific Rim through the stories of its people. The Pacific Rim—the countries that surround the Pacific Ocean—has been long used as a military and economic term that encompasses a vast history of trade and migration. The region was also the starting point for Detour: Lived Worlds, a special section of Art021, a contemporary art fair in Shanghai. The works in the section are as varied as the regions which they represent. At Páramo, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American artist who left Vietnam in the ‘70s, took the refugee blankets given by NGO workers to those out at sea to create imaginary cartographies that represent their homes. Detour: Lived Worlds, 2018 Exhibition view, Páramo | ART021 Image courtesy of ART021 Contemporary Art Fair Engulfed (detalle), 2018 Resin and space blanket on canvas 142.4 x 212.4 x 4 cm Tattered, 2018 Punctured, 2018 Resin and space blanket on canvas Resin and space blanket on canvas 44 x 65 x 4 cm 58 x 86 x 4 cm EMPTY FOREST, 2017 EXHIBITION Empty Forest is a body of work comprising objects and videos that explore the relationships between mythology, worship, animal extinction, human consumption and political protest. Can the concept of extinction become tangible, acting as a material that can serve as a conduit for understanding our belief systems? There are beliefs in Vietnam originating from centuries of influence from traditional Chinese medicine that consuming rhino horn can cure cancer amongst a variety of other illnesses. Rhinos have recently become extinct in Vietnam. Beyond the region, this belief has created a global environmental emergency regarding rhinoceros populations all over the world, having the most impact specifically in South Africa. Tons of illegal rhino horn from South Africa are seized on route to Vietnam and China in recent years. Similarly, another species, the pangolin, is seeing the same plight. Because their scales are believed to treat a multitude of illnesses, illegal pangolin poaching, and trading is leading it towards extinction of the species in Southeast Asia, India and West Africa. It is that layer of social psychology in which mythical animals, like the dragon, the kirin, and the phoenix are believed to be auspicious in certain cultures and to have influence on the different factors of one’s life, such as health, financial success and longevity that add layers of complexity to the human and animal relationship. This project pits traditions of worship against practices of consumption. These objects play between the fantastical imaginaries of the past and new imaginations of the future to explore the complexities of our relationship with the natural world as well as the possibilities of an alternative connection to mythology and nature world. Empty Forest, 2017 Exhibition view The Factory Contemporary Art Center, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Feng Shui Monster (Buy Me I’ll Bring Good Fortune), 2017 The Nouveau Riche Wanna Eat Everything, 2017 Concrete, ceramic, brass, porcupine quills with custom pedestal Composite, bamboo and fabric 37.7 x 33.8 x 20” / 96 x 86 x 51 cm 61 x 26.7 x 23.6” / 155 x 68 x 60 cm The Things That Are Living Are Dead No. 5, 2017 Diptych: Photographic ink-jet print 35.4 x 19.6” / 90 x 50cm (sheet, each) 36.2 x 20.4” / 92 x 52cm (frame, each) Ed. 1/5 + 2 AP THE ISLAND, 2017 SHORT FILM; 42 MIN The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientist who has washed ashore after the world’s final nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Island was part of the selected artworks for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Portrait of a Refuge as a Refugee II, 2017 Inkjet on photo paper (stills from short film) 40 x 71 cm / 15.75 x 27.95” The Island, 2017 Exhibition view Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico Portrait of a Refuge as a Refugee I, 2017 Portrait of a Refuge as a Refugee VI, 2017 Inkjet on photo paper (stills from short film) Inkjet on photo paper (stills from short film) 40 x 71 cm / 15.75 x 27.95” 40 x 71 cm / 15.75 x 27.95” Edition of 3 + 2APs VIET NAM THE WORLD TOUR, 2017 PROJECT Viet Nam The World Tour began in 2010 as an attempt to create a “rogue-nation-unbranding” campaign. It appropriates marketing language, graffiti strategies, hip-hop vernacular, and internet video distribution platforms to re-associate a historically colonized and mediated national identity with an entirely new mediated history. Very soon after its initial installment in Amsterdam and Paris, it became part of a collective project by The Propeller Group, enabling it to expand to something more like a large-scale campaign. This online media platform is an attempt to create a mechanism that re-works and problematize ideas of nation-hood and nation-branding by becoming its nation- branding campaign that sets out on a challenge to re-associate a historically saturated icon with renewed meaning. If history is an immense archive determined by the printed/written word, impenetrable, how does one overcome its hold on the current state of relations? How can one interject into that archive to re-adjust or counter- balance its favoritism? If George Orwell was correct in saying, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” How then can we interject into this dialogue? Viet Nam The World Tour collaborates with leading street dancers, graffiti artists, public muralists, thinkers, writers, designers and artists and brings them on tour around the world; creating public interventions, performances, interactive events and workshops, and giving away t-shirts, stickers, and other memorabilia. The Propeller Group’s most recent iteration of the project, entitled Birds of No Nation, is a traveling mural that features a collaboration between El Mac of Los Angeles and Shamsia Hassani of Kabul, Afghanistan. The 7-meter-wide mural [enamel and acrylic on canvas] is a portrait of Shamsia painted by El Mac in his unique style using spray cans. The design elements depicted by Shamsia are an extension of her graffiti work. The poem, written in Pashto by Shamsia reads: “Birds of no nation / All are captive / Like me / Without voices to sing”. Viet Nam The World Tour, 2017 Ongoing project Location: Paris, France Viet Nam The World Tour, 2017 Viet Nam The World Tour, 2017 Ongoing project Ongoing project Location: Los Angeles, USA Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam TEMPORARY PUBLIC ART GALLERY, 2010 PUBLIC ART This public intervention, initiated with an Art Matters Foundation grant, explores matters concerning public space, public art, privatized commercial space and the politics of censorship behind the regulation of these spaces in Ho Chi Minh City. The aim was to act as an advertising agency, rent a commercial billboard at ground- level and curate it as a public art gallery. Members of The Propeller Group as well as other artists practicing in the local context were asked to submit ideas and images for this public space. As all visual elements in the landscape, from public art to advertisement, are controlled through different censorship bodies, public art in Viet Nam has been limited in the last few decades to marble sculptures in the park and some old propaganda signage attached to various walls throughout different cities. However, the landscape has been shifting from having more propaganda to now having more advertising, while public art remains innocuous, inaccessible, and limited by these censorship bodies, attempted to circumnavigate these limitations, trying to locate a loophole in the system by renting out advertising space to curate artworks in public; challenging notions of public space, advertising, and public art in Viet Nam. Temporary Public Art Gallery, 2010 Public art Temporary Public Art Gallery, 2010 Public art ENEMY’S ENEMY: A MONUMENT TO A MONUMENT, 2009 In this work, an image of a burning monk is meticulously carved into the barrel of a baseball bat, the engulfing flames eating away at its wooden strength. This carefully crafted sculpture refers to the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc on June 11, 1963, bringing attention to the repressive and discriminatory policies against Buddhists by the Catholic Diem regime (which was set up by the American government). Ironically, a memorial erected on the site of this human sacrifice in Ho Chi Minh City, even though under Communism, religion is considered irreconcilable with the desire to transform the social class.
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