An Artist Sees the Potential for Healing in the Aftermath of War

On the third floor of the New Museum in New York, the elevator doors part to reveal a series of framed photographs in which uniformed soldiers stare stoically at the camera, a groom wraps an arm around his smiling bride on their wedding day, women and children pose for formal studio portraits, and extended families gather around dining tables eating and laughing. It’s easy to imagine the mix of black-and-white, sepia, and color prints in the background of someone’s living room, rather than hanging on a gallery wall. These moments, spanning several decades, represent generations of the Vietnamese Senegalese community in Dakar, whose stories have often gone untold or have been deliberately suppressed.

In Radiant Remembrance, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s first solo exhibition in a US museum, the Vietnamese artist expands the possibilities of collective memory and storytelling through film and video installations, as well as archival material and sculptures. While research remains integral to Nguyen’s practice, he also understands its limits. “I would go out on a limb and say that the archive is quite useless,” he tells the exhibition’s curator Vivian Crockett in a conversation for the accompanying catalog. He clarifies that he’s referring to official records, which often preserve only one side or a partial version of history. Nguyen explains, “I use the archive as a counterpoint to what I’m doing, creating a counternarrative and working with people that are marginalized or have been disregarded in the dominant narrative to bring their stories to the forefront.”

In addition to connecting with families in Senegal who sent him the archival photographs installed at the exhibition’s entrance, Nguyen collaborated with the descendants of the Senegalese soldiers who, during the 1940s and ’50s, were sent by the French to fight anticolonial uprisings in Southeast Asia, and the Vietnamese wives they brought back home with them. He captures their complicated legacies in The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), a “metafictional” project, first shown at the Dakar Biennale in 2022, that features imagined conversations narrated over four video channels. In one of three stories, a woman silhouetted in profile, speaking into a microphone, recounts a memory in French; the English subtitle reads, “I remember you stood in front of a rifle in Indochina to save a black man.” Timeworn portraits flash across an adjacent screen, showing a younger version of the grandmother whom the speaker is addressing and the Black man in question, her grandfather. The reenactment of a granddaughter combing her grandmother’s hair appears on a different screen, while on another a woman faces the camera directly and mouths the words heard in the narration: “Did the black soldier return?” The immersive approach brings to life the anecdotes hidden within family photos while simultaneously acknowledging the gaps for what may never be known.

Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe (2023), Nguyen’s most recent film to examine Vietnam’s postcolonial history, takes an even greater speculative turn. As with the previous project, the two-channel video relies on an imagined conversation, this time by way of a woman’s letter to her father who died after defecting from the French army during the same anticolonial uprisings fought by Senegalese soldiers. In this case, her father was one of many Moroccans sent to Vietnam, who left behind a monument: the Moroccan Gate in Hanoi. The structure appears throughout the film, ultimately becoming a surreal portal that connects father and daughter, who says to him: “If I find you, I’ll bring you back to Morocco. But if I can’t find you, I’ll bring Morocco to you.” On the second screen, the portal erupts into flames as the woman fades away. Accompanying the film is Letters from the Other Side (2023), two wall hangings embroidered with text lifted from propaganda leaflets, which were intended to persuade the North African colonial soldiers to the Vietnamese cause.

Found objects and sculptures become physical embodiments of the traumas explored in the single-channel video The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). The film, a work of fiction grounded in historical events, follows a character named Nguyệt who makes art out of junkyard scraps and weapons leftover from when the US bombed the Vietnamese province of Quảng Trị. Those pieces take the form of Alexander Calder–inspired mobiles, which Nguyen cast from a brass artillery shells and unexploded ordnances. A Rising Moon through the Smoke (2022) reflects fragments of the video projection on its hanging mirrored surfaces, emphasizing the relationship between the film and the “testimonial object”—a concept Nguyen borrows from scholar Marianne Hirsch. Another sculpture, Unexploded Resonance (2022), reconfigures an M117 bomb, previously dropped from an American B-52 plane, into a temple bell. Further drawing upon the film’s Buddhist imagery, Shattered Arms (2022) features a found Quan Yin carving whose missing hand and fingers Nguyen replaced with new appendages also cast from brass artillery shells. This act of restoration and transformation echoes the real-life stories depicted in the film, such as that of Hồ Văn Lai, whose encounter with an unexploded landmine as a child resulted in the loss of his limbs and an eye.

Together, Nguyen’s multimedia works consider the potential for healing in the aftermath of colonial violence and war. By incorporating pieces of historical “evidence” alongside first-person accounts, the artist reminds us how large-scale events reverberate through interpersonal stories and vice versa. The process of remembrance similarly unlocks the complex lives captured in those family photographs. Even then, Nguyen’s art only begins to scratch the surface of the many entangled global histories that have been overlooked, perhaps, but not forgotten.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance is on view at the New Museum, New York, through September 17, 2023.